Lulu Jiang

Lulu Jiang

Independent researcher · global hydrography

I build global datasets and open tools for river basins, river networks and flow paths, from MERIT Hydro (90 m) and HydroSHEDS v2 (30 m). They are published at fullhydro.org.

Open to full-time positions from February 2027Research scientist or scientific developer roles in hydrology, hydroinformatics or geospatial data, in academia or industry. Open to relocation. Please get in touch by email.

About

I work on global hydrography: turning flow-direction grids into datasets and open tools for river basins, river networks and flow paths. I write the processing code in C, which I use every day for the speed and memory control that global grids need, and I release the tools as Python packages so that most users can install and use them. The Python versions are released online; if you need the C version, please email me. The work is collected at FullHydro. It includes a global 90 m basin dataset with a per-pixel upstream index, now in open discussion at Earth System Science Data, and a computational foundation for hyperresolution hydrology on the global 90 m drainage network, submitted to Geoscientific Model Development.

I received my BSc in Surveying and Mapping Engineering from the School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, in 2014 and my PhD in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing from the School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University, in 2020. From December 2020 to November 2023 I was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, working on hydrological modelling and flood forecasting; this work was published in 2025 in the Journal of Hydrometeorology and Environmental Modelling & Software.

Since June 2024 I have worked as an independent researcher, part-time at first and full time since mid-2025. Together with my former colleagues at Sun Yat-sen University I completed three further papers, now under review at Water Resources Research, Earth System Science Data and Geoscientific Model Development. I now work full time on FullHydro.

Education and experience

  1. 2024–now

    Independent researcher

    Global hydrography datasets and tools, fullhydro.org

  2. 2020–2023

    Postdoctoral researcher

    School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University

  3. 2020

    PhD, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing

    School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University

  4. 2014

    BSc, Surveying and Mapping Engineering

    School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University

Papers

Under review

  1. Global analysis of Hack’s law: decomposing the geometric origins of h > 0.5 across scales and sampling paradigms

    Lulu Jiang, Huan Wu, Weitian Chen, Lei Qu, Ting Yang, Youlong Xia

    Water Resources Researchin revision

  2. MERIT-FullBasin: a global 90-meter basin dataset with a per-pixel upstream index and morphometric attributes

    Lulu Jiang, Huan Wu, Weitian Chen, Zhijun Huang, Ting Yang

    Earth System Science Data · preprintin open discussion

  3. MERIT-FlowTopo v1.0: a reusable computational foundation for hyperresolution hydrology on the global 90 m drainage network

    Lulu Jiang, Huan Wu, Weitian Chen, Zhijun Huang, Dai Yamazaki, Ting Yang, Lingfeng Li

    Geoscientific Model Developmentsubmitted

Published

  1. Combining climate forcings and initial hydrological conditions for enhanced subseasonal to seasonal flood forecasting

    Lulu Jiang, Huan Wu, Chaoqun Li, John Kimball, Guojun Gu, Ying Hu, Sirong Chen, Yamin Hu, Shaorou Dong, Xiuhua Zhou

    Journal of Hydrometeorology, 26(12), 1867–1886, 2025 · doi

  2. Accelerating large-scale hydrological modeling with stepwise spatial-temporal multimember parallelization

    Lulu Jiang, Huan Wu, Ting Yang, Lei Qu, Zhijun Huang

    Environmental Modelling & Software, 191, 106495, 2025 · doi

  3. Satellite-based evapotranspiration in hydrological model calibration

    Lulu Jiang, Huan Wu, Jing Tao, John S. Kimball, Lorenzo Alfieri, Xiuwan Chen

    Remote Sensing, 12(3), 428, 2020 · doi

Support my research

If my datasets or tools have been useful to you, you are welcome to support this work.

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