MeanDRS River Width Sampling: Code corresponding to "Intrinsic spatial scales of river stores and fluxes and their relative contributions to the global water cycle"

Corresponding peer-reviewed publication

This dataset corresponds to all input and output files that were used in the study reported in:

• Wade, J., David, C.H., Collins, E.L., Denbina, M., Cerbelaud, A., Tom, M., Reager, J.T., Frasson, R.P.M., Famiglietti, J.S., Lee, T., Gierach, M.M. (In Review), Intrinsic spatial scales of river stores and fluxes and their relative contributions to the global water cycle.

When making use of any of the files in this dataset, please cite both the aforementioned article and the dataset herein.

Summary

The Earth’s rivers vary in size across several orders of magnitude. Yet, the relative significance of small upstream reaches compared to large downstream rivers in the global water cycle remains unclear, challenging the determination of adequate spatial resolution for observations. Using monthly simulations of river stores and fluxes from the MeanDRS river routing dataset, we sample global rivers by a range of estimated river width thresholds to investigate the intrinsic spatial scales of the global river water cycle. We frame these scale-dependent river dynamics in terms of observational capabilities, assessing how the size of rivers that can be resolved influences our ability to capture key global hydrologic stores and fluxes.

We aim to answer two questions:

1. What is the intrinsic spatial resolution of global river dynamics?
2. How can the spatial scale of river processes be used to inform efficient monitoring and modeling strategies of global river stores and fluxes?

Software

Please visit https://github.com/jswade/meandrs-width-sampling for instructions on code usage through Docker.