ALBERT

Description: Pokhara (ca. 850 m a.s.l.), Nepal's second-largest city, lies at the foot of the Higher Himalayas and has more than tripled its population in the past 3 decades. Construction materials are in high demand in rapidly expanding built-up areas, and several informal settlements cater to unregulated sand and gravel mining in the Pokhara Valley's main river, the Seti Khola. This river is fed by the Sabche glacier below Annapurna III (7555 m a.s.l.), some 35 km upstream of the city, and traverses one of the steepest topographic gradients in the Himalayas. In May 2012 a sudden flood caused 〉70 fatalities and intense damage along this river and rekindled concerns about flood risk management. We estimate the flow dynamics and inundation depths of flood scenarios using the hydrodynamic model HEC-RAS (Hydrologic Engineering Center’s River Analysis System). We simulate the potential impacts of peak discharges from 1000 to 10 000 m3 s−1 on land cover based on high-resolution Maxar satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap data (buildings and road network). We also trace the dynamics of two informal settlements near Kaseri and Yamdi with high potential flood impact from RapidEye, PlanetScope, and Google Earth imagery of the past 2 decades. Our hydrodynamic simulations highlight several sites of potential hydraulic ponding that would largely affect these informal settlements and sites of sand and gravel mining. These built-up areas grew between 3- and 20-fold, thus likely raising local flood exposure well beyond changes in flood hazard. Besides these drastic local changes, about 1 % of Pokhara's built-up urban area and essential rural road network is in the highest-hazard zones highlighted by our flood simulations. Our results stress the need to adapt early-warning strategies for locally differing hydrological and geomorphic conditions in this rapidly growing urban watershed.

Description: This dataset contains observations of water discharge rates and concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) from a polygonal tundra site in the Lena River Delta, Russia. This dataset also contains lateral carbon fluxes of DOC and DIC that were estimated from these observations. Additionally, this dataset contains vertical fluxes of carbon dioxide and methane from the same study site. All observations were recorded on Samoylov Island (N 72.377188, E 126.495144) in the summer of 2014. The abbreviations A1, A2 and B refer to three outflows on the island where the hydrological parameters were observed (A1: N 72.379991, E 126.480886; A2: N 72.380134, E 126.481433; B: N 72.381348, E 126.483482). All outflows were approximately 10 meters. More information can be found in https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-19-3863-2022.