Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Water Resources Research
One of the challenges in global hydrology is to simulate water resources globally at a resolution that is fine enough to be of local relevance. However, these hyper-resolution (less than 1 kilometer) simulations are limited by the very high computational demand of routing water through the global river system.
Shrestha et al. [2025] devise a very clever upscaling algorithm for stream directions that allows simulating streamflow at low-resolution, while still being able to locally refine ate points of interest, such as locations where streamflow is measured. This computational breakthrough opens the door to very detailed global hydrological simulations, not only for global hydrology, but for Earth system science at large.
Citation: Shrestha, P. K., Samaniego, L., Rakovec, O., Kumar, R., & Thober, S. (2025). A novel stream network upscaling scheme for accurate local streamflow simulations in gridded global hydrological models. Water Resources Research, 61, e2024WR038183.  https://doi.org/10.1029/2024WR038183 Â
—Marc F. P. Bierkens, Editor, Water Resources Research
Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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