Colin J. Gleason
Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Amherst MA
Colin Gleason's research tries to understand the quantity and quality if the water in all rivers on earth.
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Expertise
Biography
He leads Fluvial@UMass, which he says calls, "a research group that cares about rivers, climate change, and the Arctic.”
Social Media
Education
State University of New York
B.S.
Forest Engineering
State University of New York
M.S.
Environmental Resources Engineering
University of California Los Angeles
Ph.D.
Geography
Select Recent Media Coverage
Scientists mapped the world’s rivers over 35 years. They found shocking changes
CNN online
2024-12-12
A new study by researchers from UMass Amherst and the University of Cincinnati has mapped 35 years of river changes on a global scale. “We think this is maybe the most accurate map of river flow ever made,” notes co-author Colin Gleason.
“Ephemeral Streams” Are Critical—and a Supreme Court Decision Puts Them at Risk
Mother Jones online
2024-07-06
Colin Gleason, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UMass Amherst has illustrated how a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling about the Clean Water Act could hurt our waterways.
Study Finds Small Streams, Recently Stripped of Protections, Are a Big Deal
The New York Times online
2024-06-27
New research by Colin Gleason, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UMass Amherst, shows that, on average, 55% of river output comes from ephemeral streams, or streams that only flow when it rains.
Billion-dollar NASA satellite launches to track Earth’s water
Smithsonian Magazine online
2022-12-16
Colin Gleason is quoted in an article about NASA’s launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite (SWOT),designed to study the impact of climate change on Earth’s water. “If SWOT does what we think it’s going to do, it’s going to change the face of hydrology,” Gleason said.
Satellites reveal Arctic rivers are changing faster than we thought
EurekAlert!
2021-11-29
“This is a new, publicly available daily record of flow across the global North,” adds Colin Gleason, civil and environmental engineering professor and principal investigator on the study. “No one has ever tried to do it at this scale: teaching the models what the satellites saw daily in half a million rivers from millions of satellite observations. It’s a very sophisticated data assimilation, which is the process of merging models and data.”
Select Publications
More flow upstream and less flow downstream: The changing form and function of global rivers
Science2024-12-13
We mapped daily streamflow from 1984 to 2018 in approximately 2.9 million rivers to assess recent changes to global river systems. We found that river outlets were dominated by significant decreases in flow, whereas headwaters were 1.7 times more likely to have significantly increased flow than decreased. These changes result in a significant upstream shift in streamflow experienced by about 29% of the global land surface. We found the most changes in the smallest steams in our study: increases in erosion potential (approximately 5% increase in stream power), flood frequency (approximately 42% increase in 100-year floods), and likely nutrient dynamics (altered seasonal flow regimes). We revealed these changes using “detail at scale” by mapping millions of individual rivers. Widely adopting this approach could reveal other changes to the hydrosphere.
Ephemeral stream water contributions to United States drainage networks
Science2024-06-28
Ephemeral streams flow only in direct response to precipitation and are ubiquitous landscape features. However, little is known about their influence on downstream rivers. Here, we modeled ephemeral stream water contributions to the contiguous United States network of more than 20 million rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, finding that ephemeral streams contribute, on average, 55% of the discharge exported from regional river systems, as defined by the United States Geological Survey. Our results show that ephemeral connectivity is a substantial pathway through which water and associated nutrients and pollution may enter the perennial drainage network and influence water quality.
Extending global river gauge records using satellite observations
Environmental Research Letters2023-05-26
Long-term, continuous, and real-time streamflow records are essential for understanding and managing freshwater resources. However, we find that 37% of publicly available global gauge records (N= 45 837) are discontinuous and 77% of gauge records do not contain real-time data. Historical periods of social upheaval are associated with declines in gauge data availability. Using river width observations from Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites, we fill in missing records at 2168 gauge locations worldwide with more than 275 000 daily discharge estimates.
Inversion of river discharge from remotely sensed river widths: A critical assessment at three-thousand global river gauges
Remote Sensing of Environment2023-03-15
Accurately estimating river discharge from satellite-derived river hydraulic variables (e.g., width, height, and slope) is the overarching goal of the remote sensing of discharge (RSQ) community. Numerous past studies have developed and intercompared different RSQ algorithms to demonstrate their feasibility, yet relatively few have focused on assessing how the RSQ algorithms are adapted to a wide range of rivers globally. As the community is now ready to expand to the global scale given advances in computing power, sensors, and the launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission, a much broader geographic view of RSQ accuracy should be prioritized toward “better generalizability” instead of “higher accuracy at limited places”.
Athabasca River Avulsion Underway in the Peace‐Athabasca Delta, Canada
Water Resources Research2023-02-22
Avulsions change river courses and transport water and sediment to new channels impacting infrastructure, floodplain evolution, and ecosystems. Abrupt avulsion events (occurring over days to weeks) are potentially catastrophic to society and thus receive more attention than slow avulsions, which develop over decades to centuries and can be challenging to identify. Here, we examine gradual channel changes of the Peace‐Athabasca River Delta (PAD), Canada using in situ measurements and 37 years of Landsat satellite imagery. A developing avulsion of the Athabasca River is apparent along the Embarras River–Mamawi Creek (EM) distributary.
Mapping and characterizing Arctic beaded streams through high resolution satellite imagery
Remote Sensing of Environment2023-02-01
Arctic beaded streams provide unique ecosystem functions and serve as important tundra habitats. Their unique ‘beads-on-a-string’ morphology is thought to form from thermokarst erosion, and they are densely represented in permafrost-ridden landscapes. Despite their ubiquity in high latitude regions, beaded stream formation and occurrence is not well studied, and beaded streams are not globally mapped. Access to these streams is challenging in their remote, dynamic environment, and up until recently, monitoring these streams through satellite imagery was difficult given their relatively small size with channel widths of a few meters.
Remote sensing of broad-scale controls on large river anabranching
Remote Sensing of Environment2022-11-17
River patterns reflect complex geomorphological processes and affect ecosystems and human development along floodplains. Physical controls on anabranching development have been studied primarily at local scales on relatively small rivers (i.e., discharge
