Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Nat Commun. 2021 Nov 25;12(1):6917. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-27228-1.
Arctic rivers drain ~15% of the global land surface and significantly influence local communities and economies, freshwater and marine ecosystems, and global climate. However, trusted and public knowledge of pan-Arctic rivers is inadequate, especially for small rivers and across Eurasia, inhibiting understanding of the Arctic response to climate change. Here, we calculate daily streamflow in 486,493 pan-Arctic river reaches from 1984-2018 by assimilating 9.18 million river discharge estimates made from 155,710 satellite images into hydrologic model simulations. We reveal larger and more heterogenous total water export (3-17% greater) and water export acceleration (factor of 1.2-3.3 larger) than previously reported, with substantial differences across basins, ecoregions, stream orders, human regulation, and permafrost regimes. We also find significant changes in the spring freshet and summer stream intermittency. Ultimately, our results represent an updated, publicly available, and more accurate daily understanding of Arctic rivers uniquely enabled by recent advances in hydrologic modeling and remote sensing.
北极河流覆盖了全球陆地表面的约 15%，对当地社区和经济、淡水和海洋生态系统以及全球气候都有重大影响。然而，人们对整个北极地区河流的了解并不充分，特别是对小河流和整个欧亚大陆的情况，这阻碍了对北极地区对气候变化的响应的理解。在这里，我们通过将 155710 张卫星图像中的 918 万条河流流量估算值同化到水文模型模拟中，计算了 1984 年至 2018 年期间 486493 个泛北极河流流域的日流量。我们揭示了比以前报告的更大和更不均匀的总水输出（多 3-17%）和水输出加速（大 1.2-3.3 倍），流域、生态区、河流等级、人类调控和多年冻土区之间存在着显著差异。我们还发现春季融雪和夏季间歇性河流的显著变化。最终，我们的结果代表了对北极河流的最新、公开和更准确的日常了解，这得益于水文模型和遥感技术的最新进展。
