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The quantification of spatial propagation of extreme precipitation events is vital in water resources planning and disaster mitigation. However, quantifying these extreme events has always been challenging as many traditional methods are insufficient to capture the nonlinear interrelationships between extreme event time series. Therefore, it is crucial to develop suitable methods for analyzing the dynamics of extreme events over a river basin with a diverse climate and complicated topography. Over the last decade, complex network analysis emerged as a powerful tool to study the intricate spatiotemporal relationship between many variables in a compact way. In this study, we employ two nonlinear concepts of event synchronization and edit distance to investigate the extreme precipitation pattern in the Ganga river basin. We use the network degree to understand the spatial synchronization pattern of extreme rainfall and identify essential sites in the river basin with respect to potential prediction skills. The study also attempts to quantify the influence of precipitation seasonality and topography on extreme events. The findings of the study reveal that (1) the network degree is decreased in the southwest to northwest direction, (2) the timing of 50th percentile precipitation within a year influences the spatial distribution of degree, (3) the timing is inversely related to elevation, and (4) the lower elevation greatly influences connectivity of the sites. The study highlights that edit distance could be a promising alternative to analyze event-like data by incorporating event time and amplitude and constructing complex networks of climate extremes.
Agriculture in India accounts for 18% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and uses significant land and water. Various socioeconomic factors and food subsidies influence diets in India. Indian food systems face the challenge of sustainably nourishing the 1.3 billion population. However, existing studies focus on a few food system components, and holistic analysis is still missing. We identify Indian food systems covering six food system components: food consumption, production, processing, policy, environmental footprints, and socioeconomic factors from the latest Indian household consumer expenditure survey. We identify 10 Indian food systems using k-means cluster analysis on 15 food system indicators belonging to the six components. Based on the major source of calorie intake, we classify the ten food systems into production-based (3), subsidy-based (3), and market-based (4) food systems. Home-produced and subsidized food contribute up to 2000 kcal/consumer unit (CU)/day and 1651 kcal/CU/day, respectively, in these food systems. The calorie intake of 2158 to 3530 kcal/CU/day in the food systems reveals issues of malnutrition in India. Environmental footprints are commensurate with calorie intake in the food systems. Embodied GHG, land footprint, and water footprint estimates range from 1.30 to 2.19 kg CO(2)eq/CU/day, 3.89 to 6.04 m(2)/CU/day, and 2.02 to 3.16 m(3)/CU/day, respectively. Our study provides a holistic understanding of Indian food systems for targeted nutritional interventions on household malnutrition in India while also protecting planetary health.
Study region:
Ca Mau Province (CMP), Mekong Delta (MD), Vietnam.
Study focus:
Groundwater from deep aquifers is the most reliable source of freshwater in the MD but extensive overexploitation in the last decades led to the drop of hydraulic heads and negative environmental impacts. Therefore, a comprehensive groundwater investigation was conducted to evaluate its composition in the context of Quaternary marine transgression and regression cycles, geochemical processes as well as groundwater extraction.
New hydrological insights for the region:
The abundance of groundwater of Na-HCO3 type and distinct ion ratios, such as Na+/Cl-, indicate extensive freshwater intrusion in an initially saline hydrogeological system, with decreasing intensity from upper Pleistocene to deeper Miocene aquifers, most likely during the last marine regression phase 60-12 ka BP. Deviations from the conservative mixing line between the two endmembers seawater and freshwater are attributed to ion-exchange processes on mineral surfaces, making ion ratios in combination with a customized water type analysis a useful tool to distinguish between salinization and freshening processes. Elevated salinity in some areas is attributed to HCO3- generation by organic matter decomposition in marine sediments rather than to seawater intrusion. Nevertheless, a few randomly distributed locations show strong evidence of recent salinization in an early stage, which may be caused by the downwards migration of saline Holocene groundwater through natural and anthropogenic pathways into deep aquifers.
After a century of semi-restricted floodplain development, Southern Alberta, Canada, was struck by the devastating 2013 Flood. Aging infrastructure and limited property-level floodproofing likely contributed to the $4-6 billion (CAD) losses. Following this catastrophe, Alberta has seen a revival in flood management, largely focused on structural protections. However, concurrent with the recent structural work was a 100,000+ increase in Calgary's population in the 5 years following the flood, leading to further densification of high-hazard areas. This study implements the novel Stochastic Object-based Flood damage Dynamic Assessment (SOFDA) model framework to quantify the progression of the direct-damage flood risk in a mature urban neighborhood after the 2013 Flood. Five years of remote-sensing data, property assessment records, and inundation simulations following the flood are used to construct the model. Results show that in these 5 years, vulnerability trends (like densification) have increased flood risk by 4%; however, recent structural mitigation projects have reduced overall flood risk by 47% for this case study. These results demonstrate that the flood management revival in Southern Alberta has largely been successful at reducing flood risk; however, the gains are under threat from continued development and densification absent additional floodproofing regulations.
Die Arbeit gibt einen Einblick in die Verständigungspraxen bei Stadtführungen mit (ehemaligen) Obdachlosen, die in ihrem Selbstverständnis auf die Herstellung von Verständnis, Toleranz und Anerkennung für von Obdachlosigkeit betroffene Personen zielen. Zunächst wird in den Diskurs des Slumtourismus eingeführt und, angesichts der Vielfalt der damit verbundenen Erscheinungsformen, Slumming als organisierte Begegnung mit sozialer Ungleichheit definiert. Die zentralen Diskurslinien und die darin eingewobenen moralischen Positionen werden nachvollzogen und im Rahmen der eigenommenen wissenssoziologischen Perspektive als Ausdruck einer per se polykontexturalen Praxis re-interpretiert. Slumming erscheint dann als eine organisierte Begegnung von Lebensformen, die sich in einer Weise fremd sind, als dass ein unmittelbares Verstehen unwahrscheinlich erscheint und genau aus diesem Grund auf der Basis von gängigen Interpretationen des Common Sense ausgehandelt werden muss. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht die vorliegende Arbeit, wie sich Teilnehmer und Stadtführer über die Erfahrung der Obdachlosigkeit praktisch verständigen und welcher Art das hierüber erzeugte Verständnis für die im öffentlichen Diskurs mit vielfältigen stigmatisierenden Zuschreibungen versehenen Obdachlosen ist. Dabei interessiert besonders, in Bezug auf welche Aspekte der Erfahrung von Obdachlosigkeit ein gemeinsames Verständnis möglich wird und an welchen Stellen dieses an Grenzen gerät. Dazu wurden die Gesprächsverläufe auf neun Stadtführungen mit (ehemaligen) obdachlosen Stadtführern unterschiedlicher Anbieter im deutschsprachigen Raum verschriftlicht und mit dem Verfahren der Dokumentarischen Methode ausgewertet. Die vergleichende Betrachtung der Verständigungspraxen eröffnet nicht zuletzt eine differenzierte Perspektive auf die in den Prozessen der Verständigung immer schon eingewobenen Anerkennungspraktiken. Mit Blick auf die moralische Debatte um organisierte Begegnungen mit sozialer Ungleichheit wird dadurch eine ethische Perspektive angeregt, in deren Zentrum Fragen zur Vermittlungsarbeit stehen.
A conundrum of trends
(2022)
This comment is meant to reiterate two warnings: One applies to the uncritical use of ready-made (openly available) program packages, and one to the estimation of trends in serially correlated time series. Both warnings apply to the recent publication of Lischeid et al. about lake-level trends in Germany.
Quantifying root water uptake is essential to understanding plant water use and responses to different environmental conditions. However, non-destructive measurement of water transport and related hydraulics in the soil-root system remains a challenge.
Neutron imaging, with its high sensitivity to hydrogen, has become an unparalleled tool to visualize and quantify root water uptake in vivo. In combination with isotopes (e.g., deuterated water) and a diffusion-convection model, root water uptake and hydraulic redistribution in root and soil can be quantified.
Here, we review recent advances in utilizing neutron imaging to visualize and quantify root water uptake, hydraulic redistribution in roots and soil, and root hydraulic properties of different plant species.
Under uniform soil moisture distributions, neutron radiographic studies have shown that water uptake was not uniform along the root and depended on both root type and age. For both tap (e.g., lupine [Lupinus albus L.]) and fibrous (e.g., maize [Zea mays L.]) root systems, water was mainly taken up through lateral roots. In mature maize, the location of water uptake shifted from seminal roots and their laterals to crown/nodal roots and their laterals.
Under non-uniform soil moisture distributions, part of the water taken up during the daytime maintained the growth of crown/nodal roots in the upper, drier soil layers. Ultra-fast neutron tomography provides new insights into 3D water movement in soil and roots. We discuss the limitations of using neutron imaging and propose future directions to utilize neutron imaging to advance our understanding of root water uptake and soil-root interactions.
How fast the Northern Hemisphere (NH) forest biome tracks strongly warming climates is largely unknown. Regional studies reveal lags between decades and millennia. Here we report a conundrum: Deglacial forest expansion in the NH extra-tropics occurs approximately 4000 years earlier in a transient MPI-ESM1.2 simulation than shown by pollen-based biome reconstructions. Shortcomings in the model and the reconstructions could both contribute to this mismatch, leaving the underlying causes unresolved. The simulated vegetation responds within decades to simulated climate changes, which agree with pollen-independent reconstructions. Thus, we can exclude climate biases as main driver for differences. Instead, the mismatch points at a multi-millennial disequilibrium of the NH forest biome to the climate signal. Therefore, the evaluation of time-slice simulations in strongly changing climates with pollen records should be critically reassessed. Our results imply that NH forests may be responding much slower to ongoing climate changes than Earth System Models predict. <br /> Deglacial forest expansion in the Northern Hemisphere poses a conundrum: Model results agree with the climate signal but are several millennia ahead of reconstructed forest dynamics. The underlying causes remain unsolved.
Trends in streamflow, rainfall and potential evapotranspiration (PET) time series, from 1970 to 2017, were assessed for five important hydrological basins in Southeastern Brazil. The concept of elasticity was also used to assess the streamflow sensitivity to changes in climate variables, for annual data and 5-, 10- and 20-year moving averages. Significant negative trends in streamflow and rainfall and significant increasing trend in PET were detected. For annual analysis, elasticity revealed that 1% decrease in rainfall resulted in 1.21-2.19% decrease in streamflow, while 1% increase in PET induced different reductions percentages in streamflow, ranging from 2.45% to 9.67%. When both PET and rainfall were computed to calculate the elasticity, results were positive for some basins. Elasticity analysis considering 20-year moving averages revealed that impacts on the streamflow were cumulative: 1% decrease in rainfall resulted in 1.83-4.75% decrease in streamflow, while 1% increase in PET induced 3.47-28.3% decrease in streamflow. This different temporal response may be associated with the hydrological memory of the basins. Streamflow appears to be more sensitive in less rainy basins. This study provides useful information to support strategic government decisions, especially when the security of water resources and drought mitigation are considered in face of climate change.
High-mountain regions provide valuable ecosystem services, including food, water, and energy production, to more than 900 million people worldwide. Projections hold, that this population number will rapidly increase in the next decades, accompanied by a continued urbanisation of cities located in mountain valleys. One of the manifestations of this ongoing socio-economic change of mountain societies is a rise in settlement areas and transportation infrastructure while an increased power need fuels the construction of hydropower plants along rivers in the high-mountain regions of the world. However, physical processes governing the cryosphere of these regions are highly sensitive to changes in climate and a global warming will likely alter the conditions in the headwaters of high-mountain rivers. One of the potential implications of this change is an increase in frequency and magnitude of outburst floods – highly dynamic flows capable of carrying large amounts of water and sediments. Sudden outbursts from lakes formed behind natural dams are complex geomorphological processes and are often part of a hazard cascade. In contrast to other types of natural hazards in high-alpine areas, for example landslides or avalanches, outburst floods are highly infrequent. Therefore, observations and data describing for example the mode of outburst or the hydraulic properties of the downstream propagating flow are very limited, which is a major challenge in contemporary (glacial) lake outburst flood research. Although glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) and landslide-dammed lake outburst floods (LLOFs) are rare, a number of documented events caused high fatality counts and damage. The highest documented losses due to outburst floods since the start of the 20th century were induced by only a few high-discharge events. Thus, outburst floods can be a significant hazard to downvalley communities and infrastructure in high-mountain regions worldwide.
This thesis focuses on the Greater Himalayan region, a vast mountain belt stretching across 0.89 million km2. Although potentially hundreds of outburst floods have occurred there since the beginning of the 20th century, data on these events is still scarce. Projections of cryospheric change, including glacier-mass wastage and permafrost degradation, will likely result in an overall increase of the water volume stored in meltwater lakes as well as the destabilisation of mountain slopes in the Greater Himalayan region. Thus, the potential for outburst floods to affect the increasingly more densely populated valleys of this mountain belt is also likely to increase in the future. A prime example of one of these valleys is the Pokhara valley in Nepal, which is drained by the Seti Khola, a river crossing one of the steepest topographic gradients in the Himalayas. This valley is also home to Nepal’s second largest, rapidly growing city, Pokhara, which currently has a population of more than half a million people – some of which live in informal settlements within the floodplain of the Seti Khola. Although there is ample evidence for past outburst floods along this river in recent and historic times, these events have hardly been quantified.
The main motivation of my thesis is to address the data scarcity on past and potential future outburst floods in the Greater Himalayan region, both at a regional and at a local scale. For the former, I compiled an inventory of >3,000 moraine-dammed lakes, of which about 1% had a documented sudden failure in the past four decades. I used this data to test whether a number of predictors that have been widely applied in previous GLOF assessments are statistically relevant when estimating past GLOF susceptibility. For this, I set up four Bayesian multi-level logistic regression models, in which I explored the credibility of the predictors lake area, lake-area dynamics, lake elevation, parent-glacier-mass balance, and monsoonality. By using a hierarchical approach consisting of two levels, this probabilistic framework also allowed for spatial variability on GLOF susceptibility across the vast study area, which until now had not been considered in studies of this scale. The model results suggest that in the Nyainqentanglha and Eastern Himalayas – regions with strong negative glacier-mass balances – lakes have been more prone to release GLOFs than in regions with less negative or even stable glacier-mass balances. Similarly, larger lakes in larger catchments had, on average, a higher probability to have had a GLOF in the past four decades. Yet, monsoonality, lake elevation, and lake-area dynamics were more ambiguous. This challenges the credibility of a lake’s rapid growth in surface area as an indicator of a pending outburst; a metric that has been applied to regional GLOF assessments worldwide.
At a local scale, my thesis aims to overcome data scarcity concerning the flow characteristics of the catastrophic May 2012 flood along the Seti Khola, which caused 72 fatalities, as well as potentially much larger predecessors, which deposited >1 km³ of sediment in the Pokhara valley between the 12th and 14th century CE. To reconstruct peak discharges, flow depths, and flow velocities of the 2012 flood, I mapped the extents of flood sediments from RapidEye satellite imagery and used these as a proxy for inundation limits. To constrain the latter for the Mediaeval events, I utilised outcrops of slackwater deposits in the fills of tributary valleys. Using steady-state hydrodynamic modelling for a wide range of plausible scenarios, from meteorological (1,000 m³ s-1) to cataclysmic outburst floods (600,000 m³ s-1), I assessed the likely initial discharges of the recent and the Mediaeval floods based on the lowest mismatch between sedimentary evidence and simulated flood limits. One-dimensional HEC-RAS simulations suggest, that the 2012 flood most likely had a peak discharge of 3,700 m³ s-1 in the upper Seti Khola and attenuated to 500 m³ s-1 when arriving in Pokhara’s suburbs some 15 km downstream.
Simulations of flow in two-dimensions with orders of magnitude higher peak discharges in ANUGA show extensive backwater effects in the main tributary valleys. These backwater effects match the locations of slackwater deposits and, hence, attest for the flood character of Mediaeval sediment pulses. This thesis provides first quantitative proof for the hypothesis, that the latter were linked to earthquake-triggered outbursts of large former lakes in the headwaters of the Seti Khola – producing floods with peak discharges of >50,000 m³ s-1.
Building on this improved understanding of past floods along the Seti Khola, my thesis continues with an analysis of the impacts of potential future outburst floods on land cover, including built-up areas and infrastructure mapped from high-resolution satellite and OpenStreetMap data. HEC-RAS simulations of ten flood scenarios, with peak discharges ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 m³ s-1, show that the relative inundation hazard is highest in Pokhara’s north-western suburbs. There, the potential effects of hydraulic ponding upstream of narrow gorges might locally sustain higher flow depths. Yet, along this reach, informal settlements and gravel mining activities are close to the active channel. By tracing the construction dynamics in two of these potentially affected informal settlements on multi-temporal RapidEye, PlanetScope, and Google Earth imagery, I found that exposure increased locally between three- to twentyfold in just over a decade (2008 to 2021).
In conclusion, this thesis provides new quantitative insights into the past controls on the susceptibility of glacial lakes to sudden outburst at a regional scale and the flow dynamics of propagating flood waves released by past events at a local scale, which can aid future hazard assessments on transient scales in the Greater Himalayan region. My subsequent exploration of the impacts of potential future outburst floods to exposed infrastructure and (informal) settlements might provide valuable inputs to anticipatory assessments of multiple risks in the Pokhara valley.