Examples

This page describes typical applications of HydroLand and will point to example material for accessing and visualising the data once it is available on this website.

Typical applications

  • Hydrological dryness screening: use the HydroLand aridity indicator and soil moisture deficit products to identify historically dry regions and assess projected changes under SSP scenarios.

  • Flood risk assessment: apply the p90/p95/p99 discharge indicator products to identify high-flow event frequencies, durations, and intensities at the basin scale.

  • Drought monitoring: use p5/p10 discharge thresholds to characterise low-flow periods and their persistence across historical and projection periods.

  • Climate adaptation planning: use HydroLand indicators to compare hydrological dryness, flood, and drought conditions across historical and projection periods.

Hydrological variables behind the indicators

The indicators are derived from HydroLand hydrological variables and forcings. These include routed river discharge from mRM (Qrouted), total runoff from mHM (Q), potential evapotranspiration (PET), and soil moisture (SWC_L01, SWC_L02, SWC_L03). These fields can help users interpret the hydrological processes behind changes in the indicator products.

Data access

HydroLand output is published on the DestinE Data Lake under the collection identifier EO.UFZ.DAT.HYDROLAND. Different model experiments appear as separate items, so users can identify the experiment, period, and realization they need and open the corresponding files directly.

Global IFS-NEMO HydroLand mHM and mRM model output is organised for the historical period (1990–2014) and the climate projection period (2015–2049) in two product families:

  • mHM flux and state files, containing soil water content (SWC_L01, SWC_L02, SWC_L03), actual evapotranspiration (aET), and total runoff (Q);

  • mRM routing files, containing routed river discharge (Qrouted).

These products carry the main STAC properties model, experiment, generation, activity, and realization, together with the global attribute application = "HydroLand" inherited from the driving climate forcing.

Data Lake access and STAC metadata conventions are documented in the DestinE Data Lake documentation.

Notebook examples

The following example notebook demonstrates data retrieval and simple plotting of HydroLand data. Additional examples will follow.