A Decade of Data-Driven Water Budgets: Synthesis and Bibliometric Review

Scarce water resources across the globe have prompted the development of data-driven water budgets to account for and distribute limited water more effectively across various land uses and purposes. Data-driven approaches for estimating individual water budget components have been extensively developed and subsequently reviewed (e.g., evapotranspiration, precipitation, groundwater, surface water, runoff), but the state of the art of data-driven approaches for estimating and integrating complete water budgets has not been the subject of a review paper to our knowledge. In this review, we fill this void by reviewing 81 systematically identified publications from the last decade (2012-2022) on data-driven water budget approaches. We describe the current state of measurements and data products for data-driven water budgets for various spatiotemporal scales. Our analysis suggests that spatiotemporal parameters drive the approach for data-driven water budgets, with larger spatiotemporal scales relying more on satellite remote sensing data products and smaller spatiotemporal scales relying more on ground-based monitoring. The incorporation of satellite remote sensing data products and ground-based monitoring was common across various spatiotemporal scales and enabled the estimation of complete water budgets in areas of limited data availability. We conclude that improved reporting of simplifying assumptions, uncertainty analysis methods, and data sources are required for the alignment of water budget estimations between resource managers at varied spatiotemporal scales. Our review calls for the standardization of data-driven water budget reporting protocols to improve the interpretability of data-driven water budgets across decision-makers working at various spatiotemporal scales. Scarce water resources across the globe have prompted the monitoring of water budgets using data, which we refer to as a data-driven water budget. We review the current state of measurements and data products for data-driven water budgets of various scales-from field to region and over minutes to decades. We conclude that satellite remote sensing data products are suitable for data-driven water budgets over large areas and long periods, but ground-based data are more suitable over small areas and shorter periods. We identify challenges for data-driven water budgets, which call for standardized reporting protocols for data-driven water budgets. The frequency and spatial scale of data-driven water budgets differ in the integration of ground-based and satellite remote sensing dataThe simplifying assumptions, uncertainty, and data sources should be reported in a data-driven water budgetThe standardization of data-driven water budget reporting protocols is needed for decision-makers working at various spatiotemporal scales