Dai Yamazaki

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at The University of Tokyo

Climate change will contribute to sea level rise (SLR), impacting coastal land use, groundwater salinity, and coastal flooding. Previous studies have analyzed the direct impact of SLR on flooding by considering coastal subsidence and the enhancement of high tide events; however, it also impacts river hydrodynamics, further worsening fluvial floodin...

Global River Models (GRMs), which simulate river flow and flood processes, have rapidly developed in recent decades. However, these advancements necessitate meaningful and standardized quality assessments and comparisons against a suitable set of observational variables using appropriate metrics, a requirement currently lacking within GRM communiti...

Accurate reservoir representation in large‐scale river models remains challenging owing to limited access to data on reservoir operations. We contribute to model development by introducing a global machine‐learning based flood storage capacity (FSC) data set and a satellite‐based target storage reservoir operation scheme (SBTS). The FSC data set fo...

Accurate flood modelling is crucial for disaster prevention. Fine-resolution global routing models can offer more detailed flood information, but balancing model efficiency with accuracy remains challenging. This study examines the conditions under which a fine-resolution model outperforms a coarser one, using the CaMa-Flood model at 0.05°, 0.083°,...

Global risk assessments of economic losses by natural disasters while considering various land uses is essential. However, sector-specific, high-resolution pixel-level economic data are not yet available globally to assess exposure to local disasters such as floods. In this study, we employed new land-use data to construct global, spatially distrib...

Over a billion people globally are already exposed to the risk of flooding, but by 2050 this number is expected to double due to human-induced climate change, population growth, and encroachment into at-risk areas. Global Flood Models (GFMs) are vital tools for producing flood hazard maps supporting impact estimates and policy interventions. These...

Water resources play a crucial role in the global water cycle and are affected by human activities and climate change. However, the impacts of hydropower infrastructures on the surface water extent and volume cycle are not well known. We used a multi-satellite approach to quantify the surface water storage variations over the 2000–2020 period and r...

In recognition of the importance of inland waters, numerous datasets mapping their extents, types, or changes have been created using sources ranging from historical wetland maps to real-time satellite remote sensing. However, differences in definitions and methods have led to spatial and typological inconsistencies among individual data sources, c...

Heavy precipitation, which is changing significantly as Earth's climate warms, can result in flooding that seriously damages societies. However, little is known about how heavy precipitation of varying durations responds to the diverse gradients of urban development in China. Through statistical analyses spanning from 1990 to 2021, we have examined...

Recently, it has been suggested that saturated lateral flow on a local scale, such as hillslope hydrodynamics, affects the terrestrial water heat balance, including evapotranspiration and soil moisture, and that the affected areas are not uncommon globally. However, no study expresses the contrast of hydrological quantities on the hillslope at a fi...

Study region: The island of Taiwan. Study focus: This study presents long-term and high-resolution modeling of flood occurrence, interdecadal patterns of river-floodplain dynamics, and analysis of flooding during two typhoon events-Nari and Morakot over Taiwan. The modeling system combines a hydrological model (HiGW-MAT) and a river hydrodynamics m...

Accurate assessment of global river flows and stores is critical for informing water management practices, but current estimates of global river flows exhibit substantial spread and estimates of river stores remain sparse. Estimates of river flows and stores are hampered by uncertainties in land runoff, an unobserved quantity that provides water in...

Global River Models (GRMs), which simulate river flow and flood processes, have rapidly developed in recent decades. However, these advancements necessitate meaningful and standardized quality assessments and comparisons against a suitable set of observational variables using appropriate metrics, a requirement currently lacking within GRM communiti...

Some recent land surface models can explicitly represent land surface process and focus more on sub‐grid terrestrial features. Many studies have involved the analysis of how hillslope water dynamics determine vegetation patterns and shape ecologically and hydrologically important landscapes, such as desert riparian and waterlogged areas. However, t...

Nighttime light (NTL) has become an emerging indicator of the magnitude and changes in human settlement and activities. A recently released moonlight-adjusted NTL product VNP46A2, with enhanced temporal (daily) and spatial (15 arc-second) resolutions, has the potential to monitor human reactions to short-term events with rapid light intensity varia...

In global hydrological models, river discharge is accumulated by following the river network, which presumes that there is one downstream destination for each grid. Implementing “diversions” where there are multiple downstream destinations, such as bifurcations and inter-basin water transfers, requires an extension of river routing algorithms. Prev...

Local inertial equations (LIEs) proposed around 2010 have been implemented in many flood simulation models. The authors have studied, using both mathematical and numerical approaches, why LIEs present higher numerical stability over earlier flood simulation models and what explains their numerical stability. This article presents reviews of several...

The current global water body maps have a resolution of approximately 30 m depending on the available remote sensing data. A water body map with higher spatial resolution is required to distinguish smaller rivers for advanced applications involving global carbon cycle and real-time flood predictions. Conventional water extraction methods use water...

Satellite altimetry data are useful for monitoring water surface dynamics, evaluating and calibrating hydrodynamic models, and enhancing river-related variables through optimization or assimilation approaches. However, comparing simulated water surface elevations (WSEs) using satellite altimetry data is challenging due to the difficulty of correctl...

Evaporation from natural lakes and artificial reservoirs represents loss of water resources; unfortunately, existing estimations are based on simplified methods. Evaporation is a phenomenon related not only to inlake thermodynamics but also to water surface area change driven by riverine in- and outflows. Thus, this study aims to reestimate evapora...

Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to flood hazards, and its flood risk is projected to increase with global warming. In addition to climate change, internal climate variation, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), influences flooding in many rivers worldwide. However, the impact of internal climate variability on flooding in Bangladesh rem...

Urban land will face high fluvial flood risk against the background of climate change and urban expansion. The effect of urban spatial expansion, instead of densification of assets within existing urban cells, on flood risk has rarely been reported. Here, we project the future flood risk of seven urban agglomerations in China, home to over 750 mill...

Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to flood hazards, and its flood risk is projected to increase with global warming. In addition to climate change, internal climate variation, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), influences flooding in many rivers worldwide. However, the impact of internal climate variability on flooding in Bangladesh rem...

Levees constrain roaring floodwater but are blamed for reducing people’s perception of flood risks and promoting floodplain human settlements unprepared for high-consequence flood events. Yet the interplay between levee construction and floodplain development remains poorly quantified, obscuring an objective assessment of human–water relations. Her...

Dams and reservoirs are human-made infrastructures that have attracted increasing attention because of their societal and environmental significance. Towards better management and conservation of reservoirs, a dataset of reservoir-catchment characteristics is needed, considering that the amount of water and material flowing into and out of reservoi...

We propose a machine learning-based approach to estimate the flood defense standard (FDS) for unlabelled sites. We adopted random forest regression (RFR) to characterize the relationship between the declared FDS and ten explanatory factors contained in publicly available datasets. We compared RFR with multiple linear regression (MLR) and demonstrat...

Flooding is a major natural hazard in many parts of the world, and its frequency and magnitude are projected to increase with global warming. With increased concern over ongoing climate change, more detailed and precise information about climate-change risks is required for formulating local-scale countermeasures. However, the impacts of biases in...

Many studies have proved that hydrological extreme values estimated from decadal observation data and river inundation simulations are associated with various uncertainties; however, few studies have evaluated the uncertainties associated with internal climate variability. We used large-ensemble river inundation simulations to quantitatively evalua...

Coastal river deltas are susceptible to flooding from pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flood drivers. Compound floods, which result from the co-occurrence of two or more of these drivers, typically exacerbate impacts compared to floods from a single driver. While several global flood models have been developed, these do not account for compound floodi...

Extensive floodplains throughout the Amazon basin support important ecosystem services and influence global water and carbon cycles. A recent change in the hydroclimatic regime of the region, with increased rainfall in the northern portions of the basin, has produced record-breaking high water levels on the Amazon River mainstem. Yet, the implicati...

Satellite altimetry data are useful for monitoring water surface dynamics, evaluating and calibrating hydrodynamic models, and enhancing river-related variables through optimization or assimilation approaches. However, comparing simulated water surface elevations (WSEs) using satellite altimetry data is challenging due to the difficulty of correctl...

Quantifying continental-scale river discharge is essential for understanding the terrestrial water cycle, but it is susceptible to errors caused by a lack of observations and the limitations of hydrodynamic modeling. Data assimilation (DA) methods are increasingly used to estimate river discharge in combination with emerging river-related remote se...

Lakes and reservoirs are ubiquitous across global landscapes, functioning as the largest repository of liquid surface freshwater, hotspots of carbon cycling, and "sentinels" of climate change. Although typically considered as lentic (hydrologically stationary) environments, lakes are an integral part of global drainage networks. Through perennial a...

Dams and reservoirs are human-made infrastructures that have attracted increasing attentions because of their societal and environmental significance. Towards better management and conservation of reservoirs, a dataset of reservoir-catchment characteristics is needed, considering that the amount water and material flowing into and out of reservoirs...

Plain Language Summary Rivers are a critical part of global hydrology, but until now the variation in how much water rivers store has not been observed directly (via a measurement based approach) on the global scale. Surface water storage and fluxes are critical in understanding the impacts and trajectory of global climate change. We created a 26 y...

Wetlands are the largest natural source of methane. The ability to model the emissions of methane from natural wetlands accurately is critical to our understanding of the global methane budget and how it may change under future climate scenarios. The simulation of wetland methane emissions involves a complicated system of meteorological drivers cou...

Flooding is a major natural hazard in many parts of the world, and its frequency and magnitude are projected to increase with global warming. With increased concern over ongoing climate change, more detailed and precise information about climate-change risks is required for formulating local-scale countermeasures. However, the impacts of biases in...

River discharge integrates many water-related processes over land, it is crucial for understanding inland water. Unfortunately, in situ measurements are very sparse at the global scale. This paper presents a totally new approach for the mapping (i.e. spatially continuous estimate) of the river discharge based on satellite observation of hydrologica...

The Amazon River basin harbors some of the world's largest wetland complexes, which are of major importance for biodiversity, the water cycle and climate, and human activities. Accurate estimates of inundation extent and its variations across spatial and temporal scales are therefore fundamental to understand and manage the basin's resources. More...

Continental‐scale river hydrodynamic modeling helps to understand the global hydrological cycle, and model evaluation is essential for calibration and performance assessment. Although many models have been evaluated using several variables separately, methods for the integrated multivariable assessment have yet to be established. We proposed an int...

Quantifying continental-scale river discharge is essential to understanding the terrestrial water cycle but is susceptible to errors caused by a lack of observations and the limitations of hydrodynamic modeling. Data assimilation (DA) methods are increasingly used to estimate river discharge in combination with emerging river-related remote sensing...

Annual probability-scale inundation maps produced by riverine inundation models are used widely as flood hazard maps in many countries and regions for evacuation planning and real estate risk management, even though producing individual flood hazard maps for each water system is costly and time-consuming. For this study, a global riverine inundatio...

Nutrient inputs from the atmosphere and rivers to the ocean are increased substantially by human activities. However, the effects of increased nutrient inputs are not included in the widely used CMIP5 Earth system models, which introduce bias into model simulations of ocean biogeochemistry. Here, using historical simulations by an Earth system mode...

Water availability per capita is among the most fundamental water-scarcity indicators used extensively in global grid-based water resources assessments. Recently, it has extended to include the economic aspect, a proxy of the capability for water management which we applied globally under socioeconomic-climate scenarios using gridded population and...

Wetlands play a key role in hydrological and biogeochemical cycles and provide multiple ecosystem services to society. However, reliable data on the extent of global inundated areas and the magnitude of their contribution to local hydrological dynamics remain surprisingly uncertain. Global hydrological models and land surface models (LSMs) include...

Global terrain classification data have been used for various issues related to topography such as the estimation of soil types and of ground vulnerability to earthquakes and the creation of seismic hazard maps. However, due to the resolution of digital elevation models (DEMs), the terrain classification data from previous studies could not discrim...

Although it is well known that precipitation and flood pulses in the Langcang-Mekong River Basin (LMRB) are largely impacted by monsoons, it is unclear to what extent flood inundation characteristics (i.e., inundation frequency, depth, area, and timing) in the basin respond to different monsoon types and monsoon combined effect, i.e., the Indian su...

The international community has agreed through the Paris Agreement to limit the global temperature rise to less than 2 °C above the pre-industrial level. In recent years, many targets with carbon-neutrality as the keyword have been announced. The realization of carbon-neutrality is much more ambitious than the Kyoto Protocol-based climate change co...

In developing countries in Asia and Africa, where flood risk information is insufficiently obtainable, companies often use available flood hazard maps developed from the Global Flood Model (GFM). As described, this study compares existing flood hazard maps based on GFM used in business practice. Then the factors causeing differences in inundation a...

Coastal river deltas are susceptible to flooding from pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flood drivers. Compound floods, which result from the co-occurrence of two or more of these drivers, typically exacerbate impacts compared to floods from a single driver. While several global flood models have been developed, these do not account for compound floodi...

River bathymetry is an important parameter for hydrodynamic modeling; however, it is associated with large bias because direct large‐scale measurements are impractical. Recent studies adjusted river bathymetry data based on assessment of the difference between modeled and observed water surface elevation (WSE); however, model uncertainties in river...

In most large-scale distributed hydrological models for flood forecasting, river cross-sections are approximated with rectangles or trapezoids, due to the amount of manual works needed to introduce a large database of surveyed river cross-sections into the models. In this study, we firstly investigated the difficulties for introducing surveyed rive...

Estimating river flood risk helps us to develop strategies for reducing the economic losses and making a resilient society. Flood-related economic losses can be categorized as direct asset damage, opportunity losses because of business interruption (BI loss), and high-order propagation effects on global trade networks. Biases in meteorological data...

Integrating reservoir flood control operations in global flood forecasting systems is important for accurately estimating discharge and other variables. Because existing modeling operational rules and parameters do not reflect the actual variability due to a lack of associated data, globally applicable modeling of flood regulation needs to be studi...

Significance Stream/river carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emission has significant spatial and seasonal variations critical for understanding its macroecosystem controls and plumbing of the terrestrial carbon budget. We relied on direct fluvial CO 2 partial pressure measurements and seasonally varying gas transfer velocity and river network surface area est...

Ensemble flood forecasts have a long lead time and provide probabilistic information. They are expected to be used for early hazard warnings. However, know-how for effective use of the information delivered from ensemble flood forecasts has not been established because ensemble flood forecasts have different characteristics from those of convention...

We project climate change induced changes in fluvial flood risks for six global warming levels between 1.5 and 4 °C by 2100, focusing on the major river basins of six countries. Daily time series of precipitation, temperature and monthly potential evapotranspiration were generated by combining monthly observations, daily reanalysis data and project...

Wetlands are the largest natural source of methane. The ability to model the emissions of methane from natural wetlands accurately is critical to our understanding of the global methane budget and how it may change under future climate scenarios. The simulation of wetland methane emissions involves a complicated system of meteorological drivers cou...

Global hydrological models used in higher resolution require representation of water transfer through aqueducts. In this study, we tried to evaluate water demand and supply more accurately by incorporating aqueducts in Indus Basin which are formed by many canals and links uniting rivers. To represent these aqueducts, we used aqueducts transfer sche...

This study uses the Rainfall-Runoff-Inundation (RRI) model applied to the entire Japan with 150-m resolution to conduct large-scale flood simulations for the Kumagawa flood in 2020 and Typhoon Hagibis in 2019. By reflecting actual river cross sections and elevation data corrections, the river water level and inundation simulations were improved for...

This study aims to create a terrain classification of Japan that allows both geomorphological and geoengineering classifications coexist without large contradictions and to distinguish landform elements even in urban plains which include noise associated with digital elevation models (DEMs). Because Japan is susceptible to natural disasters, we des...

Availability of water per capita is among the most fundamental water-scarcity indicators and has been used extensively in global grid-based water resources assessments. Recently, it has been extended to include the economic aspect, a proxy of the capability for water management. We applied the extended index globally under SSP–RCP scenarios using g...

Distributed hydrological models rely on hydrography data such as flow direction, river length, slope and width. For large-scale applications, many of these models still rely on a few flow direction datasets, which are often manually derived. We propose the Iterative Hydrography Upscaling (IHU) method to upscale high-resolution flow direction data t...

Terrestrial surface water temperature is a key variable affecting water quality and energy balance, and thermodynamics and fluid dynamics are tightly coupled in fluvial and lacustrine systems. Streamflow generally plays a role in the horizontal redistribution of heat, and thermal exchange in lakes predominantly occurs in a vertical direction. Howev...

Daily floods including event, characteristic, extreme and inundation in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin (LMRB), crucial for flood projection and forecasting, have not been adequately modeled. An improved hydrological-hydrodynamic model (VIC and CaMa-Flood) considering regional parameterization was developed to simulate the flood dynamics over the ba...

Global terrain classification data have been used for various issues that are known to be related to topography, such as estimation of soil types, estimation of Vs30, and creation of seismic hazard maps. However, due to the resolution of the DEMs used, the terrain classification data from previous studies could not discriminate small landforms, suc...

Monitoring of hydrological hazards (e.g., drought, flooding, etc.) is largely limited by the lack of appropriate modeling systems and high‐quality input data, especially in less developed countries and data‐scarce regions. The fundamental data set for global drought monitoring and flood modeling is the digital elevation model (DEM), and hydrographi...

Better understanding and quantification of river floods for very local and flashy events calls for modeling capability at fine spatial and temporal scales. However, long-term discharge records with a global coverage suitable for extreme events analysis are still lacking. Here, grounded on recent breakthroughs in global runoff hydrology, river model...

Floods are major natural disasters that have considerable consequences worldwide. As the frequency and magnitude of flooding are expected to be affected by ongoing climate change, understanding their past changes is important for developing adequate adaptation measures. However, the limited spatiotemporal coverage of flood gauges hinders detection...

The land-surface developments of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) are based on the Carbon-Hydrology Tiled Scheme for Surface Exchanges over Land (CHTESSEL) and form an integral part of the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), supporting a wide range of global weather, climate and environmental applications. In order to...

A vector‐river network explicitly uses realistic geometries of river reaches and catchments for spatial discretization in a river model. This enables improving the accuracy of the physical properties of the modeled river system, compared to a gridded river network that has been used in Earth System Models. With a finer‐scale river network, resolvin...

The ongoing increases in anthropogenic radiative forcing have changed the global water cycle and are expected to lead to more intense precipitation extremes and associated floods. However, given the limitations of observations and model simulations, evidence of the impact of anthropogenic climate change on past extreme river discharge is scarce. He...

Constellations of small satellites equipped with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payloads can realize observations in short time intervals independently from daylight and weather conditions and this technology is now in the early stages of development. This tool would greatly contribute to rapid flood monitoring, which is usually one of the main mis...

Floods can be devastating in densely populated regions along rivers, so attaining a longer forecast lead time with high accuracy is essential for protecting people and property. Although many techniques are used to forecast floods, sufficient validation of the use of a forecast system for operational alert purposes is lacking. In this study, we val...