Photo by Michael Miller, Texas A&M AgriLife Marketing and Communications
Water-related research and news from universities around Texas
Assessing Global Reservoir-Based Hydrological Droughts by Fusing Storage and Evaporation: Led by Texas A&M University scientists, this research developed an integrated reservoir drought index based on reservoir storage and evaporation that can help to identify, detect, and characterize droughts more efficiently. They found that reservoir-based droughts were driven by climate in 71% of the 38 reservoirs examined and by human activities in 29% of reservoirs.
Water insecurity tradeoffs: U.S. drinking water systems during the COVID-19 pandemic: Conducted by Texas A&M researchers, this paper analyzed how the pandemic impacted water security for communities in the short-term and long-term. The research shows that the pandemic water crisis increased institutional and technological innovation to increase resilience for future events, but financial challenges remain for both utilities and customers in the post-pandemic years.
Redox trapping of arsenic in hyporheic zones modified by silicate weathering beneath floodplains: With co-authors from Texas A&M, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Texas at San Antonio, this research studied how river-groundwater mixing influences the fate of dissolved arsenic trapped within a natural reactive barrier.
Stochastic properties of coastal flooding events – Part 1: convolutional-neural-network-based semantic segmentation for water detection: Texas A&M and University of Houston researchers used a camera-based system to measure beach and back-beach flooding as part of the after-storm recovery of an eroded beach on the Texas coast. The team analyzed high-temporal resolution images of the beach using convolutional neural network (CNN) -based semantic segmentation to study the stochastic properties of flooding events, and then evaluated the accuracy of the CNN predictions.
Influence of climate variability on change in storage of overexploited aquifers in a semi-arid region: Coauthored by a Texas A&M scientist, this study analyzed connections between climate variability and rates of change in groundwater storage, obtained from geostatistical groundwater modeling, aiming to provide useful data for regions with overexploited aquifers.
