Welcoming the debate on the assumptions underpinning water resource monitoring in India triggered by the Mihir Shah Committee report, the authors suggest that the proposed National Water Commission should focus on providing integrated data and science to help water managers and policymakers, avoiding getting directly involved in planning or regulation.

This critique assesses if the National Water Framework Bill 2016 and the Mihir Shah Committee report are truly interdisciplinary and based on the principles of integrated water systems governance. The question still remains whether the recommendations are enough to bridge existing gaps and address future challenges in water governance.

The location and persistence of surface water (inland and coastal) is both affected by climate and human activity and affects climate, biological diversity and human wellbeing. Global data sets documenting surface water location and seasonality have been produced from inventories and national descriptions, statistical extrapolation of regional data and satellite imagery, but measuring long-term changes at high resolution remains a challenge. Here, using three million Landsat satellite images, we quantify changes in global surface water over the past 32 years at 30-metre resolution.

The goal of this work is to assess climate change and its impact on the predictability of seasonal (i.e., April–July) streamflow in major water supply watersheds in the Sierra Nevada.

Original Source

Predictions of river flow dynamics provide vital information for many aspects of water management including water resource planning, climate adaptation, and flood and drought assessments. Many of the subjective choices that modellers make including model and criteria selection can have a significant impact on the magnitude and distribution of the output uncertainty. Hydrological modellers are tasked with understanding and minimising the uncertainty surrounding streamflow predictions before communicating the overall uncertainty to decision makers.

Augmenting previous papers about the exceptional 2011–2015 California drought, we offer new perspectives on the “snow drought” that extended into Oregon in 2014 and Washington in 2015. Over 80% of measurement sites west of 115°W experienced record low snowpack in 2015, and we estimate a return period of 400–1000 years for California’s snowpack under the questionable assumption of stationarity. Hydrologic modeling supports the conclusion that 2015 was the most severe on record by a wide margin.

The world’s rivers deliver 19 billion tonnes of sediment to the coastal zone annually1, with a considerable fraction being sequestered in large deltas, home to over 500 million people. Most (more than 70 per cent) large deltas are under threat from a combination of rising sea levels, ground surface subsidence and anthropogenic sediment trapping2, 3, and a sustainable supply of fluvial sediment is therefore critical to prevent deltas being ‘drowned’ by rising relative sea levels2, 3, 4.

In May 2014, extreme floods occurred in the lower Sava River basin, causing major damage, with catastrophic consequences. Based on the data gathered, the weather situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina's (BiH) Bosna River basin was analysed and the hydrological conditions were provided, including the results of the probability analysis of the size of the recorded precipitation and flow rates. According to the observed data, extremely high precipitation intensities produced specific discharges of 1.0 m3 s−1 km−2.