Flooding leads to disastrous impacts on human society and activities worldwide, including damage to physical assets and interruptions to daily activities. However, evaluation for such impacts remains challenging, particularly beyond inundation zones, due to the difficulties in monitoring human activities on a global scale. Nighttime light (NTL) remote sensing data provides a unique perspective for human activities on a large scale, reflecting variations in light intensity caused by flood impact. Here we show the possibility of using a high-quality NTL dataset to assess flood impact on human society and activities. Indices providing impact severity and duration were generated with NTL as proxies for flood impact on pixel scale. Results show the consistency of NTL-derived and reported impact duration for five selected cases, which confirms the reliability of NTL flood impact. A large portion (> 96%) of NTL-based affected areas did not overlap with the satellite-based inundation area for 99 cases in 2013, indicating the unique value of NTL in assessing flood impact beyond inundation. The NTL flood impact indices were mapped at 15 arc-second spatial resolution for 876 events on a global scale from 2013 to 2021. Then, administrative-level characteristics of NTL flood impact were compared at a global scale. It was found that lower developed regions exhibit higher vulnerability and challenge in recovery, and are more likely to experience extremely serious and long-lasting impacts compared to higher developed areasverall, using NTL data, in addition to conventional inundation-based methods, offers an innovative perspective on flood impact evaluation.

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, the global locations and abundance of hillslope-dominated landscapes remain unclear. To address this knowledge gap, we propose a globally applicable method that employs high-resolution elevation, hydrography, and land cover data to neatly resolve explicit land cover heterogeneity for the mapping of hillslope-dominated landscapes. First, we aggregate pixels into unit catchments to represent topography-based hydrological units, and then vertically discretize them into height bands to approximate the hillslope profile. The dominant land cover type in each height band is determined, and the uphill land cover transition is analyzed to identify hillslope-dominated landscapes. The results indicate that hillslope-dominated landscapes are distributed extensively worldwide in diverse climate zones. Notably, some landscapes, including gallery forests in northeastern Russia and desert riparian in the Horn of Africa, are newly revealed. Furthermore, the proposed strategy enables more accurate representation of explicit land cover heterogeneity than does the simple downscaling of a rectangular grid from larger to smaller units, revealing its capability to neatly resolve land cover heterogeneity in land surface modeling with relatively high accuracy. Overall, we present the extensive global distribution of landscapes shaped by hillslope water dynamics, underscoring the importance of the explicit resolution of heterogeneity in land surface modeling.

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 communities. This study proposes the implementation of a benchmark system designed to facilitate the assessment of river models and enables comparisons against established benchmarks. The benchmark system incorporates satellite remote sensing data, including water surface elevation and inundation extent information, with necessary preprocessing. Consequently, this evaluation system encompasses a larger geographical area compared to traditional methods relying solely on in-situ river discharge measurements for GRMs. A set of evaluation and comparison metrics has been developed, including a quantile-based comparison metric that allows for a comprehensive analysis of multiple simulation outputs. The test application of this benchmark system to a global river model (CaMa-Flood), utilizing diverse runoff inputs, illustrates that the incorporation of bias-corrected runoff data leads to improved model performance across various observational variables and performance metrics. The current iteration of the benchmark system is suitable for global-scale assessments and can effectively evaluate the impact of model development as well as facilitate intercomparisons among different models. The source codes are accessiable from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10903211.

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, river discharge model uncertainties can lead to unintended errors in the correction. In this study, we propose a simple but robust correction method using the WSE bias, based on stage–discharge rating curves rather than time series data. The rating curve represents only the characteristics of the river section, and is not sensitive to instantaneous errors. Our results showed that the “corrected river bathymetry” converged among discharge experiments driven by noise-corrupted runoff forcing. Given the difficulty of eliminating discharge errors, a method for correcting river bathymetry that is free from discharge errors is important for improving hydrodynamic modeling.

Land surface water is a key component of the global water cycle. Compared to remote sensing by satellites, both temporal extension and spatial continuity is superior in modeling of water surface area. However, overall evaluation of models representing different kinds of surface waters at the global scale is lacking. We estimated land surface water area (LSWA) using the Catchment-based Macro-scale Floodplain model (CaMa-Flood), a global hydrodynamic model, and compared the estimates to Landsat with 3″ spatial resolution at the global scale. Results show that the two methodologies show agreement in the general spatial patterns of LSWA (e.g., major rivers and lakes, open-to-sky floodplains), but globally consistent mismatches were found under several land surface conditions. CaMa-Flood underestimates LSWA in high northern latitudes (e.g., the Canadian Shield) and coastal areas, as the presence of isolated lakes in local depressions or small coastal rivers is not considered by the model’s physical assumptions. In contrast, model-estimated LSWA is larger than Landsat estimates in forest-covered areas (e.g., Amazon basin) due to the opacity of vegetation for optical satellite sensing, and in cropland areas due to the lack of dynamic water processes (e.g., re-infiltration, evaporation, water consumption) and constraints of water infrastructure (e.g., canals, levees). These globally consistent differences can be reasonably explained by the model’s physical assumptions or optical satellite sensing characteristics, and applying filters (e.g., floodplain topography mask, forest and cropland mask) to the two datasets allows the remaining local-scale discrepancies to be attributed to locally varying factors (e.g., channel parameters, atmospheric forcing).