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High-resolution surface water dynamics in Earth’s small and medium-sized reservoirs
Small and medium-sized reservoirs play an important role in water systems that need to cope with climate variability and various other man-made and natural challenges. Although reservoirs and dams are criticized for their negative social and environmental impacts by reducing natural flow variability...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9374738/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35962157 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-17074-6 |
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author | Donchyts, Gennadii Winsemius, Hessel Baart, Fedor Dahm, Ruben Schellekens, Jaap Gorelick, Noel Iceland, Charles Schmeier, Susanne |
author_facet | Donchyts, Gennadii Winsemius, Hessel Baart, Fedor Dahm, Ruben Schellekens, Jaap Gorelick, Noel Iceland, Charles Schmeier, Susanne |
author_sort | Donchyts, Gennadii |
collection | PubMed |
description | Small and medium-sized reservoirs play an important role in water systems that need to cope with climate variability and various other man-made and natural challenges. Although reservoirs and dams are criticized for their negative social and environmental impacts by reducing natural flow variability and obstructing river connections, they are also recognized as important for social and economic development and climate change adaptation. Multiple studies map large dams and analyze the dynamics of water stored in the reservoirs behind these dams, but very few studies focus on small and medium-sized reservoirs on a global scale. In this research, we use multi-annual multi-sensor satellite data, combined with cloud analytics, to monitor the state of small (10–100 ha) to medium-sized (> 100 ha, excluding 479 large ones) artificial water reservoirs globally for the first time. These reservoirs are of crucial importance to the well-being of many societies, but regular monitoring records of their water dynamics are mostly missing. We combine the results of multiple studies to identify 71,208 small to medium-sized reservoirs, followed by reconstructing surface water area changes from satellite data using a novel method introduced in this study. The dataset is validated using 768 daily in-situ water level and storage measurements (r2 > 0.7 for 67% of the reservoirs used for the validation) demonstrating that the surface water area dynamics can be used as a proxy for water storage dynamics in many cases. Our analysis shows that for small reservoirs, the inter-annual and intra-annual variability is much higher than for medium-sized reservoirs worldwide. This implies that the communities reliant on small reservoirs are more vulnerable to climate extremes, both short-term (within seasons) and longer-term (across seasons). Our findings show that the long-term inter-annual and intra-annual changes in these reservoirs are not equally distributed geographically. Through several cases, we demonstrate that this technology can help monitor water scarcity conditions and emerging food insecurity, and facilitate transboundary cooperation. It has the potential to provide operational information on conditions in ungauged or upstream riparian countries that do not share such data with neighboring countries. This may help to create a more level playing field in water resource information globally. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9374738 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-93747382022-08-14 High-resolution surface water dynamics in Earth’s small and medium-sized reservoirs Donchyts, Gennadii Winsemius, Hessel Baart, Fedor Dahm, Ruben Schellekens, Jaap Gorelick, Noel Iceland, Charles Schmeier, Susanne Sci Rep Article Small and medium-sized reservoirs play an important role in water systems that need to cope with climate variability and various other man-made and natural challenges. Although reservoirs and dams are criticized for their negative social and environmental impacts by reducing natural flow variability and obstructing river connections, they are also recognized as important for social and economic development and climate change adaptation. Multiple studies map large dams and analyze the dynamics of water stored in the reservoirs behind these dams, but very few studies focus on small and medium-sized reservoirs on a global scale. In this research, we use multi-annual multi-sensor satellite data, combined with cloud analytics, to monitor the state of small (10–100 ha) to medium-sized (> 100 ha, excluding 479 large ones) artificial water reservoirs globally for the first time. These reservoirs are of crucial importance to the well-being of many societies, but regular monitoring records of their water dynamics are mostly missing. We combine the results of multiple studies to identify 71,208 small to medium-sized reservoirs, followed by reconstructing surface water area changes from satellite data using a novel method introduced in this study. The dataset is validated using 768 daily in-situ water level and storage measurements (r2 > 0.7 for 67% of the reservoirs used for the validation) demonstrating that the surface water area dynamics can be used as a proxy for water storage dynamics in many cases. Our analysis shows that for small reservoirs, the inter-annual and intra-annual variability is much higher than for medium-sized reservoirs worldwide. This implies that the communities reliant on small reservoirs are more vulnerable to climate extremes, both short-term (within seasons) and longer-term (across seasons). Our findings show that the long-term inter-annual and intra-annual changes in these reservoirs are not equally distributed geographically. Through several cases, we demonstrate that this technology can help monitor water scarcity conditions and emerging food insecurity, and facilitate transboundary cooperation. It has the potential to provide operational information on conditions in ungauged or upstream riparian countries that do not share such data with neighboring countries. This may help to create a more level playing field in water resource information globally. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-08-12 /pmc/articles/PMC9374738/ /pubmed/35962157 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-17074-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2022, corrected publication 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Donchyts, Gennadii Winsemius, Hessel Baart, Fedor Dahm, Ruben Schellekens, Jaap Gorelick, Noel Iceland, Charles Schmeier, Susanne High-resolution surface water dynamics in Earth’s small and medium-sized reservoirs |
title | High-resolution surface water dynamics in Earth’s small and medium-sized reservoirs |
title_full | High-resolution surface water dynamics in Earth’s small and medium-sized reservoirs |
title_fullStr | High-resolution surface water dynamics in Earth’s small and medium-sized reservoirs |
title_full_unstemmed | High-resolution surface water dynamics in Earth’s small and medium-sized reservoirs |
title_short | High-resolution surface water dynamics in Earth’s small and medium-sized reservoirs |
title_sort | high-resolution surface water dynamics in earth’s small and medium-sized reservoirs |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9374738/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35962157 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-17074-6 |
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