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.

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The original version of this Article contained an error in the Data Availability section where “All new data and code generated in this research are available under the terms of Creative Commons BY 4.0 (for the data) and Apache 2.0 (for the code) licenses. Datasets and supplementary materials generated during this study are accessible from the TODO: upload and add Zenodo link here. The source code used to produce datasets is accessible from: https://github.com/global-water-watch/research-reservoir-water-dynamics. For more information about this research and to access the demo app visit: https://globalwaterwatch.earth.” now reads: “All new data and code generated in this research are available under the terms of Creative Commons BY 4.0 (for the data) and Apache 2.0 (for the code) licenses. Datasets and supplementary materials generated during this study are accessible from the supplementary materials document below. The source code used to produce datasets is accessible from: https://github.com/global-water-watch/research-reservoir-water-dynamics. For more information about this research and to access the demo app visit: https://globalwaterwatch.earth.” The original Article has been corrected.

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Floods are major natural disasters that have considerable consequences worldwide. As the frequency and magnitude of flooding are expected to be affected by ongoing climate change, understanding their past changes is important for developing adequate adaptation measures. However, the limited spatiotemporal coverage of flood gauges hinders detection of changes in flooding, particularly in poorly gauged regions. Here, we propose a method using surface water data of river floodplain inundation as a proxy of the magnitude and frequency of flooding. Surface water data − Aqua Monitor which represented the probability linear trend changes in land and water surface area based on 30-m Landsat images between 1984–2000 and 2000–2013 was used in this study. The changes in water surface area over the floodplain obtained from Aqua Monitor showed high correspondence with historical trends observed or simulated annual maximum daily discharge, indicating the potential to detect changes in frequency and magnitude of flood from satellite data. In regions where changes could be measured with sufficient satellite images, 29% showed an increase in water surface area in the flood plain, 41% showed a decrease, and 30% showed small or no changes.

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Coastal zones constitute one of the most heavily populated and developed land zones in the world. Despite the utility and economic benefits that coasts provide, there is no reliable global-scale assessment of historical shoreline change trends. Here, via the use of freely available optical satellite images captured since 1984, in conjunction with sophisticated image interrogation and analysis methods, we present a global-scale assessment of the occurrence of sandy beaches and rates of shoreline change therein. Applying pixel-based supervised classification, we found that 31% of the world’s ice-free shoreline are sandy. The application of an automated shoreline detection method to the sandy shorelines thus identified resulted in a global dataset of shoreline change rates for the 33 year period 1984–2016. Analysis of the satellite derived shoreline data indicates that 24% of the world’s sandy beaches are eroding at rates exceeding 0.5 m/yr, while 28% are accreting and 48% are stable. The majority of the sandy shorelines in marine protected areas are eroding, raising cause for serious concern. @en

This thesis studies automated methods of surface water detection from satellite imagery. Multiple existing methods are explored, discussed, and some new algorithms are introduced to allowvery accurate detection of surface water and surfacewater changes. Themethods range in applicability from the local level to global, and from detecting high-frequency changes to low-frequency changes. Their trade-offs regarding the accuracy and applicability of the surface water detection methods are also discussed. Several applications are presented to test the introduced methods. One of the studies focuses on a long-term global surface water change detection over the past 30 years at 30m resolution. The other application looks at the generation of a permanent surface water mask for Murray-Darling River Basin in Australia. Additionally, an in-depth validation for a small reservoir in California, USA is presented, to demonstrate performance of the new methods. The algorithms discussed in the thesis were applied and tested to process both passive optical multispectral and active Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data. Combining data fromall freely available satellite sensors requires harmonizations of the satellite data, but also, significant computing resources. In this thesis, Google Earth Engine parallel processing platformwas used to performmost of the experiments. We will see, thatwhen studying surface water dynamics, the best results can be achieved by combining discriminative and generative methods of surface water detection. This way, the surface water can also be detected from satellite images where surface water is only partially visible. In the thesis, top-of-atmosphere reflectance images are used to detect surface water. The atmospheric correction is not required when dynamic local thresholding methods are used to detect surface water.@en

Accurate maps of surface water are essential for many environmental applications. Surface water maps can be generated by combining measurements from multiple sources. Precise estimation of surface water using satellite imagery remains a challenging task due to the sensor limitations, complex land cover, topography, and atmospheric conditions. As a complementary dataset, in the case of hilly landscapes, a drainage network can be extracted from high-resolution digital elevation models. Additionally, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) initiatives, such as OpenStreetMap, can also be used to produce high-resolution surface water masks. In this study, we derive a high-resolution water mask using Landsat 8 imagery and OpenStreetMap as well as (potential) a drainage network using 30 m SRTM. Our approach to derive a surface water mask from Landsat 8 imagery comprises the use of a lower 15% percentile of Landsat 8 Top of Atmosphere (TOA) reflectance from 2013 to 2015. We introduce a new non-parametric unsupervised method based on the Canny edge filter and Otsu thresholding to detect water in flat areas. For hilly areas, the method is extended with an additional supervised classification step used to refine the water mask. We applied the method across the Murray-Darling basin, Australia. Differences between our new Landsat-based water mask and the OpenStreetMap water mask regarding positional differences along the rivers and overall coverage were analyzed. Our results show that about 50% of the OpenStreetMap linear water features can be confirmed using the water mask extracted from Landsat 8 imagery and the drainage network derived from SRTM. We also show that the observed distances between river features derived from OpenStreetMap and Landsat 8 are mostly smaller than 60 m. The differences between the new water mask and SRTM-based linear features and hilly areas are slightly larger (110 m). The overall agreement between OpenStreetMap and Landsat 8 water masks is about 30%.

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A few years ago Deltares started a large multidisciplinary project named Next Generation Hydro Software. The main focus of the project is to improve, harmonize and integrate existing hydro software that has been developed throughout the years. Important technological innovations include development of the new computational core D-Flow Flexible Mesh, as well as the user-friendly, open modelling environment Delta Shell. The project involves more than 40 scientists and software engineers. The new integrated system will allow both water managers and modelers to do their work better and faster. The unique characteristic of the project is that it focuses on the possibility of setting up integrated models of the whole aquatic chain from the source to the sea, resulting in complex model configurations. The challenges further increase because of the involvement of experts from many different fields within the aforementioned aquatic chain. Furthermore, the project addresses the complete workflow of a modeler, including model setup, calibration and validation. For this purpose the system includes new scientific visualization, analysis and interactive modeling tools that enable users to improve their understanding of the modelled processes. Applications of the system show the successful integration of 0D (lumped hydrological models and real-time control rules), 1D (river flow and water quality models) and 2D/3D model components (river, estuary and coastal areas). In this paper some of the preliminary results of the project are demonstrated, as well as its current status and a preview of possible future developments @en

Developing easy-to-use software that combines components for simultaneous visualization, simulation and interaction is a great challenge. Mainly, because it involves a number of disciplines, like computational fluid dynamics, computer graphics, high-performance computing. One of the main characteristics of an interactive model is that it should provide immediate feedback to the user, for example respond to changes in model state or view settings. Features involving interaction during simulation are usually available for models with a relatively small number of computational cells and are used mainly for demonstration and educational purposes. The reason for that is that the time required to compute a single time step and render model results become significant when comparing to a simple model. It would be useful if interactive modeling would also work for models typically used in consultancy projects involving large scale simulations. This results in a number of technical challenges related to the combination of the model itself and the visualization tools (scalability, implementation of an appropriate API for control and access to the internal state). While model parallelization is increasingly addressed by the environmental modeling community, little effort has been spent on developing a highperformance interactive environment. What can we learn from the other domains where visualizations plays crucial role, such as 3D animation, gaming, virtual globes (Autodesk 3ds Max, Google Earth) that also focus on efficient interaction with 3D environments? In these domains high efficiency is usually achieved by the use of computer graphics algorithms such as surface simplification depending on current view, distance to objects, and efficient caching of the aggregated representation of object meshes. We investigate how these algorithms can be re-used in the context of interactive hydrodynamic modeling without significant changes to the model code and allowing model operation on both multi-core CPU personal computers and high-performance computer clusters. @en