Lulu Jiang

Lulu Jiang

Independent researcher global hydrography

I specialise in high-performance hydrological computing. I build global datasets and open tools for river basins, river networks and flow paths from MERIT Hydro (90 m) and HydroSHEDS v2.0 (30 m), published at fullhydro.org. My background includes hydrological modelling and flood forecasting. I program mainly in C and am also fluent in Python.

About

I work on global hydrography: turning flow-direction grids into datasets and open tools for river basins, river networks and flow paths. My recent work includes a global 90 m basin dataset with a per-pixel upstream index (under review at Earth System Science Data), a computational foundation for hyperresolution hydrology on the global 90 m drainage network (under review at Geoscientific Model Development) and a global analysis of Hack’s law (under review at Water Resources Research).

I received my BSc in Surveying and Mapping Engineering from Wuhan University in 2014 and my PhD in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing from Peking University in 2020. From December 2020 to November 2023 I was a postdoctoral researcher at 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. From 2024 to 2026 I completed the research begun during the postdoc, which led to the three papers above; during this period I also held part-time employment unrelated to research. Since 2026 I have worked as an independent researcher, full time on FullHydro.

Education and experience

  1. 2026–now

    Independent researcher

    Global hydrography datasets and tools, fullhydro.org

  2. 2024–2026

    Self-funded research

    Completing the postdoctoral research for publication

  3. 2024–2026

    Part-time employment unrelated to research

  4. 2020–2023

    Postdoctoral researcher

    Hydrological modelling and flood forecasting, School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University

  5. 2020

    PhD, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing

    School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University

  6. 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 designs

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

    Water Resources Researchrevised version under review

  2. FullBasin: a global 90 m basin dataset derived from MERIT Hydro, with a per-pixel upstream index and upstream catchment attributes

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

    Earth System Science Data · preprintunder review

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

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

    Geoscientific Model Development · preprintunder review

  4. FlowDivide: a standard workflow for hydrographic attributes from flow-direction grids that outgrow a computer’s memory

    Lulu Jiang, Weitian Chen

    Environmental Modelling & Softwareunder review

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