USGS Water Seminar Series – Watershed hydrologic function in wetland landscapes: from satellite storage–discharge to process informed deep learning
Wednesday, August 12th, at 12 pm ET (MS Teams)
Presented by Ali Ameli | The University of British Columbia | Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
Wetland-dominated landscapes cover millions of square kilometers worldwide and regulate floods and droughts, sustain water supplies, and shape carbon and nutrient cycling. What ties these functions together is how a watershed stores water and releases it as streamflow, described by its storage–discharge (S–Q) relationship. This relationship is the most compact description we have of watershed hydrologic function, and the backbone of the conceptual models we build. Yet in wetland landscapes, where connectivity switches on and off as depressions fill and spill, S–Q has been difficult to infer and remains poorly understood.
In this talk I describe how satellite observations are changing that. Across the Prairie Pothole Region, satellite-mapped wetland inundation explains interannual runoff better than climate indices, revealing responses that range from linear to strongly threshold-like. Building on this, I present a proof of concept that watershed-scale S–Q relationships can be derived directly from globally available satellite data across a nested hierarchy of watersheds spanning nearly three orders of magnitude in area, and ask how wetland configuration and watershed size shape them.
I then turn to what this enables. Understanding regional S–Q behavior is the prior that process informed hybrid deep learning needs, opening a path to regionalizing hydrologic behavior and wetland storage dynamics to ungauged watersheds. I close with what these tools reveal about wetland connectivity, and about how drainage and restoration reshape floods, droughts, and groundwater
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