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Channel water storage anomaly: A new remotely sensed quantity for global river analysis
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  • Stephen Paul Coss,
  • Michael Durand,
  • C. K. Shum,
  • Yuchan Yi,
  • Xiao Yang,
  • Tamlin M Pavelsky,
  • Augusto Getirana,
  • Dai Yamazaki
Stephen Paul Coss
Ohio State University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Michael Durand
Ohio State University
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C. K. Shum
Ohio State University
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Yuchan Yi
Ohio State University
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Xiao Yang
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Tamlin M Pavelsky
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Augusto Getirana
NASA GSFC
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Dai Yamazaki
University of Tokyo
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Abstract

River channels store large volumes of water globally, critically impacting ecological and biogeochemical processes. Despite the importance of river channel storage, there is not yet an observational constraint on this quantity. We introduce a 26-year record of entirely remotely sensed volumetric channel water storage (CWS) change on 26 major world rivers. We find mainstem volumetric CWS climatology amplitude (CA) represents an appreciable amount of basin-wide terrestrial water storage variability (median 2.78%, range 0.04-12.54% across world rivers), despite mainstem rivers themselves represent an average of just 0.2% of basin area. We find that two global river routing schemes coupled with land surface models reasonably approximate CA (within ±50%) in only 11.5 % (CaMa-Flood) and 30.7 % (HyMap) of rivers considered. These findings demonstrate volumetric CWS is a useful quantity for assessing global hydrological model performance, and for advancing understanding of spatial patterns in global hydrology.