Markus Disse

Technische Universität München | TUM · Institute of Water and Environment

Sustainable management of groundwater resources highly relies on the accurate estimation of recharge. However, accurate recharge estimation is a challenge, especially in data-scarce regions, as the existing models are data-intensive and require extensive parameterization. This study developed a process-based hydrologic model combining local and rem...

Salt dilution is a well-established streamflow measurement method in creeks, which works particularly well downstream of turbulent flow sections as the mixing of the salt tracer is enhanced. Usually, salt dilution measurements are performed manually, which considerably limits the observations of rare peak flow events. These events are particularly...

The process-based water system models have been transitioning from single-functional to integrated multi-objective and multi-functional since the worldwide digital upgrade of urban water system management. The proliferation of model complexity results in more significant uncertainty and computational requirements. However, conventional model calibr...

Drought is typically induced by the extreme water deficit stress that cascades through the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Cascading drought events could cause severe damage in multiple systems. However, identifying cascading drought connections considering the dynamic space-time progression remains challenging, which hinders further explor...

The Kobo Valley is part of the East African Rift System in northern Ethiopia. Due to its location, the valley is geologically complex in terms of structure, stratigraphy, and lithology. Because of this complexity, groundwater resource management in the area requires understanding the groundwater basin’s hydrogeology and would be improved with the d...

Salt dilution is a well-established streamflow measurement method in creeks, which works particularly well downstream of turbulent flow sections as mixing of the salt tracer is enhanced. Usually salt dilution measurements are performed manually, which considerably limits the observations of rare peak flow events. However, these events are particula...

Modeling inland water quality by remote sensing has already demonstrated its capacity to make accurate predictions. However, limitations still exist for applicability in diverse regions, as well as to retrieve non-optically active parameters (nOAC). Models are usually trained only with water samples from individual or local groups of waterbodies, w...

Study RegionThe Naryn River Basin, KyrgyzstanStudy FocusWe investigate the impacts of climate change in the basin based on two families of General Circulation Models (GCMs) using the hydrological model SWAT. The forcing datasets are the widely used ISIMIP2 (I2) and the newly derived ISIMIP3 (I3) data which refer to the 5th and 6th stage of the Coup...

Hydrometeorological observational data can be affected by trends, change points and inhomogeneities. It is often difficult to correctly identify the cause of these statistical properties of the time series and therefore they represent a source of uncertainty that can propagate to the hydrological model results. We examine two case studies of high-e...

Meltwater from mountainous catchments dominated by snow and ice is a valuable source of fresh water in many regions. At mid-latitudes, seasonal snow cover and glaciers act like a natural reservoir by storing precipitation during winter and releasing it in spring and summer. Snowmelt is usually modelled either by energy balance or by temperature-ind...

Sustainable and climate-resilient decisions in flood risk management (FRM) are complex problems, which should consider flood mitigation, but also ecological, economic, and social aspects within a collaborative decision-making process. In this article, we explore the state of multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and decision-support systems (DSS) in German...

Flood events triggered by heavy rain, such as pluvial and flash floods, are a common threat worldwide. However, it is usually not known which areas and cities are particularly vulnerable to flooding caused by heavy rain. To enable regional-scale susceptibility assessment, we developed a novel methodology based on tree-based classifiers that conside...

Presentation at the EGU General Assembly 2022 | The project goals have changed in the meantime, so the abstract is no longer up to date. I expect a publication in a journal in the medium term. | Please excuse my brevity at the end of the presentation - there was a strict time limit. | Don't hesitate to contact me if you are interested in further de...

Melt water from snow and ice dominated mountainous catchments is a valuable source of fresh water in many regions. Seasonal snow cover and glaciers act like a natural reservoir by storing precipitation during winter and releasing it in spring and summer. Snowmelt runoff is usually modelled either by energy balance or by temperature-index approaches...

During the 21st century, artificial intelligence methods have been broadly applied in geosciences to simulate complex dynamic ecosystems, but the use of artificial intelligence (AI) methods to reproduce land-use/cover change (LUCC) in arid ecosystems remains rare. This paper presents a hybrid modeling approach to understand the complexity in LUCC....

Groundwater flooding can cause severe damages to homes, utilities, and infrastructure and yield significant economic and social costs. Numerical models are used to understand these events and are the basis to produce imagery products for risk management and communication. However, such maps are generally produced using forward model simulations, an...

Central Asia is a data scarce region, which makes it difficult to monitor and minimize the impacts of a drought. To address this challenge, in this study, a high-resolution (5 km) Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index (SPEI-HR) drought dataset was developed for Central Asia with different time scales from 1981–2018, using Climate Hazards gro...

Design of the Erosion and Runoff Laboratory (EARL)

Modelling runoff generation in high-elevation Alpine catchments requires detailed knowledge on the spatio-temporal distribution of snow storage. With Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI), it is possible to map snow cover with a high temporal and spatial resolution. In contrast to the coarse MODIS data, Sentinel-2 MSI enables the investigation...

Low-technology adoption through agricultural extension may be a consequence of providing generic information without sufficient adaptation to local conditions. Data-rich paradigms may be disruptive to extension services and can potentially change farmer-advisor interactions. This study fills a gap in pre-existing, generic advisory programs by sugge...

In the Anthropocene era, humans have become one of the most important factors influencing the Earth system. The achievements of the Anthropocene have brought us enormous prosperity. There are increasing signs that the unintended side effects are endangering this prosperity and even our civilization. The current situation, such as the separation of...

Due to the remote location and the extreme climate, monitoring stations in Arctic rivers such as Lena in Siberia have been decreasing through time. Every year, after a long harsh winter, the accumulated snow on the Lena watershed melts, leading to the major annual spring flood event causing heavy transport of sediments, organic carbon, and trace me...

Of particular importance in a world of increasing water scarcity is the temporal and spatial relationship between a shortage in rainfall—meteorological drought—and a shortage in available water, or hydrological drought. Propagation time from meteorological to hydrological drought should be calculated at a higher (sub-monthly) temporal resolution wi...

Tarim River basin is the largest endorheic river basin in China. Due to the extremely arid climate the water supply solely depends on water originating from the glacierised mountains with about 75% stemming from the transboundary Aksu River. The water demand is linked to anthropogenic (specifically agriculture) and natural ecosystems, both competin...

Remote Sensing, as a driver for water management decisions, needs further integration with monitoring water quality programs, especially in developing countries. Moreover, usage of remote sensing approaches has not been broadly applied in monitoring routines. Therefore, it is necessary to assess the efficacy of available sensors to complement the o...

In the Mediterranean, climate change effects are projected to be particularly strong, and with them, the already prominent use of groundwater as a source for drinking water and irrigation is likely to increase. The sustainable amount of water that can be extracted from an aquifer is determined by groundwater recharge. Although important as an indic...

Using historical data compiled by the Climate Research Unit, spatial and temporal analysis, trend analysis, empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis, and Taylor diagram analysis were applied to test the ability of 24 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) climate models to accurately simulate the annual mean surface air temperatu...

Floodplain restoration measures are among the most well-known nature-based solutions for flood risk reduction but practitioners see their limitations in comparison to technical measures when considering both their effectiveness and profitability. The aim of this study is to show the co-benefits (besides flood risk reduction) of floodplain restorati...

Floodplains provide ecosystem services (ES). Their evaluation is complex and integrative assessment remains challenging for sciences and practices. Studies have been published in the last two decades reporting ES monetary values of floodplains. Since ES are site-specific, we focus on those studies regarding the Europe’s second largest river basin,...

Flash floods are a worldwide threat to humans, which is why they are being intensively studied using historical event records. As measurements and event data increase, databases are becoming increasingly important for flash flood research. However, the recent literature on flood databases lacks technical details as well as discussions about a suita...

This book discusses approaches to sustainable management of river oases along the Tarim River located in Xinjiang (northwest China). The Tarim Basin is one of the most arid regions in the world. Surrounded by the high mountain of Tian Shan, Kunlun and Pamir, the Taklamakan Desert dominates the landscape. The Tarim River originating from the snow an...

Flooding, a significant natural disaster, attracts worldwide attention because of its high impact on communities and individuals and increasing trend due to climate change. A flood forecast system can minimize the impacts by predicting the flood hazard before it occurs. Artificial neural networks (ANN) could efficiently process large amounts of dat...

This study performs a comparison of two model calibration/validation approaches and their influence on future hydrological projections under climate change by employing two climate scenarios (RCP2.6 and 8.5) projected by four global climate models. Two hydrological models (HMs), snowmelt runoff model + glaciers and variable infiltration capacity mo...

The machine learning algorithm ‘random forest’ has been applied in many areas of water resources research including discharge simulation. Due to low setup and operation cost, random forest could represent an alternative approach to physical and conceptual hydrological models for large-scale hazard assessment in multiple catchments. Yet, the applica...

In operational flood risk management, a single best model is used to assess the impact of flooding, which might misrepresent uncertainties in the modelling process. We have used quantified uncertainties in flood forecasting to generate flood hazard maps that were combined based on different exceedance probability scenarios. The purpose is to differ...

In many countries, floods are the leading natural disaster in terms of damage and losses per year. Early prediction of such events can help prevent some of those losses. Artificial neural networks (ANN) show a strong ability to deal quickly with large amounts of measured data. In this work, we develop an ANN for outputting flood inundation maps bas...

We present simulations of real flood and tsunami events using a hybrid OpenMP-MPI model on high-performance cluster systems. The two-dimensional shallow water equations were solved by means of the in-house code NUFSAW2D, using an edge-based cell-centred finite volume method with the central-upwind scheme for millions of unstructured cells, thus ens...

Retention and detention basins are engineering constructions with multiple objectives; e.g., flood protection and irrigation. Their performance is highly location-dependent, and thus, optimization strategies are needed. LOCASIN (Location detection of retention and detention basins) is an open-source MATLAB tool that enables automated and rapid dete...

Remote-sensing-based machine learning approaches for water quality parameters estimation, Secchi Disk Depth (SDD) and Turbidity, were developed for the Valle de Bravo reservoir in central Mexico. This waterbody is a multipurpose reservoir, which provides drinking water to the metropolitan area of Mexico City. To reveal the water quality status of i...

Abstract. Ecological changes in arid lands are often determined by the available water resources. For ecological protection, it is important to consider both hydrological and ecological processes. This paper presents a modeling approach to assess environmental changes and ecosystem services (ESS) in the largest inland river basin in China. Current...

The quantification of model structure uncertainty on hydraulic models is very important for flash flood simulations. The choice of an appropriate model structure complexity and assessment of the impacts due to infrastructure failure can have a huge impact on the simulation results. To assess the risk of flash floods, coupled hydraulic models, inclu...

Simulating karst spring discharge and land use change impacts in a recharge area is strategic for water resource management in many countries worldwide. We introduce a user-friendly modeling environment by integrating the recently proposed LuKARS (Land use change modeling in KARSt systems) model into the FREEWAT (FREE and Open Source Software Tools...

Hochwasser entsteht, wenn die Speicherkapazität des Bodens aufgrund lang anhaltender Niederschläge erschöpft ist (Sättigungsflächenabfluss, Dunnescher Oberflächenabfluss (s. Dunne et al. 1975) oder wenn die Infiltrationskapazität deutlich geringer als die Niederschlagsintensität ist (Hortonscher Oberflächenabfluss; s. Horton 1933)

Due to the global warming, an increase in the number and intensity of flash flood events triggered by heavy rain is expected. Flash flood risk management requires the identification of regions where the occurrence of flash flood events can be expected to become more frequent. In this study, we shed light on the occurrence and characteristics of fla...

Flood risk management has proven successful at reducing the threat of some flooding hazards, preventing loss of life during flooding events and easing the economic burden to communities and regions following floods. It is a useful approach for assessing risks and guiding decisions on implementing protection measures. Recently, in addition to flood...

In this tutorial a discharge time series from Mosel river will be studied, analyzed, and processed using R. The data set will be later used to generate synthetic time series (in R) which could be used for different applications, for example designing reservoirs, fill missing gaps in data and understanding future trends. Note: The Input data and the...

Soil volumetric water content (VWC) is a vital parameter to understand several ecohydrological and environmental processes. Its cost-effective measurement can potentially drive various technological tools to promote data-driven sustainable agriculture through supplemental irrigation solutions, the lack of which has contributed to severe agricultura...

Flash flood research crucially relies on historical event information for hypothesis testing. However, flash flood science suffers from data scarcity. Due to the high effort for event data collection, few long-term and comprehensive flash flood datasets exist. Yet, to advance flash flood research, scientists should spend time on creating event data...

The authors regret incorrect attribution of the hydrotope mapping in the research paper (chapter ‘2.2. Hydrotopes’). The wrong sentence is: ‘A detailed field mapping campaign was carried out by Markart et al. (2012) following the method by Koeck and Hochbichler (2012).’ The corrected sentence including the correct attribution of the hydrotope map...

Groundwater is the main source of drinking water supply in Jordan. Over the past 30 years, many wellfields have been drilled and expanded to cover increasing drinking water demand caused by natural population growth, development of life standards and as a result of the influx of refugees to Jordan. In particular, northern Jordan groundwater resourc...

TELEMAC-2D is a well known and established hydrodynamic model solving the shallow water equations. Since 2013, the SCS-CN-method has been implemented in TELEMAC-2D. With this supplement, the runoff generation is linked to overland flow and TELEMAC-2D could be extended to a Hydrodynamic Rainfall-Runoff Model (HDRRM). Thus the most important requisit...

Lumped hydrological models are tools commonly used in karst water resource management, however, their parameters cannot be obtained from field measurements and need to be estimated by model calibration. In general, the more hydrological processes are represented in a lumped parameter model, the higher the dimensionality of the parameter space. In p...

Hydrological models are generally calibrated at longer time-steps (monthly, seasonal, or annual) than their computational time-step (daily), because of better calibration performance, lower computational requirements, and the lack of reliable temporally-fine observed discharge data (particularly in developing countries). The consequences of having...

Time-lapse cameras in combination with simple measuring rods can form a highly reliable low-cost sensor network monitoring snow depth in a high spatial and temporal resolution. Depending on the number of cameras and the temporal recording resolution, such a network produces large sets of image time series. In order to extract the snow depth time se...

The consideration of uncertainties in flood risk assessment has received increasing attention over the last 2 decades. However, the assessment is not reported in practice due to the lack of best practices and too wide uncertainty bounds. We present a method to constrain the model roughness based on measured water levels and reduce the uncertainty b...

Real-time flood forecasting can help authorities in providing reliable warnings to the public. Ensemble prediction systems (EPS) have been progressively used for operational flood forecasting by European hydrometeorological agencies in recent years. This process, however, is non-deterministic such that uncertainty sources need to be accounted befor...

River discharges flood forecasting is a complex task with multiple sources of uncertainty. Bayesian methods can incorporate multiple types of uncertainties by inferring the probability density function of ensemble forecasts based on past events. However, such methods lead to forecasts with large uncertainty bands. In order to reduce the uncertainty...