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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-5497</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>MERIT-FlowTopo v1.0: a reusable computational foundation for hyperresolution hydrology on the global 90 m drainage network</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Jiang</surname>
<given-names>Lulu</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0004-1440-1603</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wu</surname>
<given-names>Huan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chen</surname>
<given-names>Weitian</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Huang</surname>
<given-names>Zhijun</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yamazaki</surname>
<given-names>Dai</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff6">
<sup>6</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yang</surname>
<given-names>Ting</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff7">
<sup>7</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Lingfeng</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Southern Marine Science and Engineering Laboratory (Zhuhai), and School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun  Yat-sen University, Zhuhai 519082, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies, Sun Yat-sen  University, Zhuhai 519082, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Climate System Prediction and Risk Management/Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters, Nanjing University of Information Science  and Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210044, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Key Laboratory of Hydrometeorological Disaster Mechanism and Warning of Ministry of Water  Resources/School of Hydrology and Water Resources, Nanjing University of Information Science and  Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210044, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>Future Water Laboratory, Innovation Center of Yangtze River Delta, Zhejiang University, Jiaxing 314102, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff6">
<label>6</label>
<addr-line>Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 153-8505, Japan</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff7">
<label>7</label>
<addr-line>CAS Engineering Laboratory for Yellow River Delta Modern Agriculture, Institute of Geographic  Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>03</day>
<month>11</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>75</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Lulu Jiang et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5497/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5497/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5497/egusphere-2026-5497.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5497/egusphere-2026-5497.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Global hydrological models still run at tens of kilometers, too coarse to resolve local floods; hyperresolution, about 1 km globally and 100 m continentally, remains the goal. With the network already mapped, the cost has shifted from mapping it to computing over it: refining a 10 km grid to 1 km multiplies cells a hundredfold, and deeper, longer flow paths make routing climb several hundredfold. Yet how a flow network should be organized has rarely been studied, though that organization governs the cost as much as the hardware. On the global 90 m MERIT Hydro network of 22.2 billion land pixels, we show how three structural choices do so: ordering sets locality in a core&apos;s private cache, layering in the shared cache, and partitioning balances load across processors without communication. Because the network is static, each structure is precomputed once from D8 flow directions and released as MERIT-FlowTopo v1.0, a reusable foundation any model traversing the network in drainage order reads instead of rebuilding. Across four terrain kernels (the elementary memory-bound step shared by routing computations on the fixed network), depth-first ordering cuts serial runtime up to 5.1-fold and lowers the simulated L3 cache-miss rate from about 37 % to 6 %, while a conflict-free downstream layering introduced here keeps converging flows lock-free and deterministic without atomic operations. MERIT-FlowTopo extends MERIT Hydro from a map to a basis for computing on it, fixing in the data the locality, scheduling, and load balance hyperresolution would otherwise demand as parallel-computing expertise.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="75"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Natural Science Foundation of China</funding-source>
<award-id>42275019</award-id>
<award-id>42088101</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs2">
<funding-source>National Key Research and Development Program of China</funding-source>
<award-id>2024YFC3013302</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs3">
<funding-source>China Meteorological Administration</funding-source>
<award-id>BYKJ2024Z10</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs4">
<funding-source>Hainan Provincial Department of Science and Technology</funding-source>
<award-id>CXFZ2022J074</award-id>
<award-id>SCSF202203</award-id>
<award-id>ZDYF2023SHFZ125</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
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