Aridification of Colorado River Basin's Snowpack Regions Has Driven Water Losses Despite Ameliorating Effects of Vegetation

Feasible optimality of vegetation patterns in river basins

[1] We examine mechanisms leading to organization of vegetation patterns within the channel network structure of a semi-arid New Mexico river basin under the controlling influence of water stress. We compare the actual pattern of water stress within the basin to patterns resulting from two algorithms of local stress optimization which proceed from an initial fully random vegetation distribution...

Identification of Pacific Ocean sea surface temperature influences of Upper Colorado River Basin snowpack

[1] Given the importance of Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB) snowpack as the primary driver of streamflow (water supply) for the southwestern United States, the identification of Pacific Ocean climatic drivers (e.g., sea surface temperature (SST) variability) may prove valuable in long‐lead‐time forecasting of snowpack in this critical region. Previous research efforts have identified El Niño–...

Water quality modelling for small river basins

Water quality modelling in small rivers is often considered unworthy from a practical and economic viewpoint. This paper shows instead that a simple model structure can be set up to describe the stationary water quality in small river basins in terms of carbon and nitrogen compounds, when the use of complex models is unfeasible. In short rivers point and nonpoint sources play a key role in shap...

River Basins: Water and Complex Adaptive Systems

The water footprint of agricultural products in European river basins

This work quantifies the agricultural water footprint (WF) of production (WFprod, agr) and consumption (WFcons, agr) and the resulting net virtual water import (netVWi, agr) of 365 European river basins for a reference period (REF, 1996–2005) and two diet scenarios (a healthy diet based upon food-based dietary guidelines (HEALTHY) and a vegetarian (VEG) diet). In addition to total (tot) amounts...