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Western Patagonia (40-56°S) is a clear example of how the systematic lack of publicly available data and poor quality control protocols have hindered further hydrometeorological studies. To address these limitations, we present PatagoniaMet (PMET), a compilation of ground-based hydrometeorological data (PMET-obs; 1950-2020), and a daily gridded product of precipitation and temperature (PMET-sim; 1980-2020). PMET-obs was developed considering a 4-step quality control process applied to 523 hydrometeorological time series obtained from eight institutions in Chile and Argentina. Following current guidelines for hydrological datasets, several climatic and geographic attributes were derived for each catchment. PMET-sim was developed using statistical bias correction procedures, spatial regression models and hydrological methods, and was compared against other bias-corrected alternatives using hydrological modelling. PMET-sim was able to achieve Kling-Gupta efficiencies greater than 0.7 in 72% of the catchments, while other alternatives exceeded this threshold in only 50% of the catchments. PatagoniaMet represents an important milestone in the availability of hydro-meteorological data that will facilitate new studies in one of the largest freshwater ecosystems in the world., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Risk management has reduced vulnerability to floods and droughts globally 1,2 , yet their impacts are still increasing 3 . An improved understanding of the causes of changing impacts is therefore needed, but has been hampered by a lack of empirical data 4,5 . On the basis of a global dataset of 45 pairs of events that occurred within the same area, we show that risk management generally reduces the impacts of floods and droughts but faces difficulties in reducing the impacts of unprecedented events of a magnitude not previously experienced. If the second event was much more hazardous than the first, its impact was almost always higher. This is because management was not designed to deal with such extreme events: for example, they exceeded the design levels of levees and reservoirs. In two success stories, the impact of the second, more hazardous, event was lower, as a result of improved risk management governance and high investment in integrated management. The observed difficulty of managing unprecedented events is alarming, given that more extreme hydrological events are projected owing to climate change 3 ., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) has received considerable attention as a global optimization technique from scientists of different disciplines around the world. In this article, we illustrate how to use PSO for inverse modeling of a coupled flow and transport groundwater model (MODFLOW2005-MT3DMS) in a fractured gneiss aquifer. In particular, the hydroPSO R package is used as optimization engine, because it has been specifically designed to calibrate environmental, hydrological and hydrogeological models. In addition, hydroPSO implements the latest Standard Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (SPSO-2011), with an adaptive random topology and rotational invariance constituting the main advancements over previous PSO versions. A tracer test conducted in the experimental field at TU Bergakademie Freiberg (Germany) is used as case study. A double-porosity approach is used to simulate the solute transport in the fractured Gneiss aquifer. Tracer concentrations obtained with hydroPSO were in good agreement with its corresponding observations, as measured by a high value of the coefficient of determination and a low sum of squared residuals. Several graphical outputs automatically generated by hydroPSO provided useful insights to assess the quality of the calibration results. It was found that hydroPSO required a small number of model runs to reach the region of the global optimum, and it proved to be both an effective and efficient optimization technique to calibrate the movement of solute transport over time in a fractured aquifer. In addition, the parallel feature of hydroPSO allowed to reduce the total computation time used in the inverse modeling process up to an eighth of the total time required without using that feature. This work provides a first attempt to demonstrate the capability and versatility of hydroPSO to work as an optimizer of a coupled flow and transport model for contaminant migration., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)