The article, "Groundwater Flow as a Regulator of a Unified River System," co-authored by Professor Rza Mahmudov, Head of the Land Hydrology and Water Resources Department at the Institute of Geography named after acad. H. Aliyev, and the department's leading scientists, PhD, Associate Professor Movlud Teymurov and PhD, Associate Professor Ziyafet Aghayev, was published in the Scopus-indexed journal "Reliability: Theory & Applications" (USA).

 According to the authors, global drinking water reserves are gradually declining due to the impact of global climate change and human activity. In addition to resource depletion, stresses associated with uneven flow distribution throughout the year also play a significant role in the emergence of water problems in arid regions, including Azerbaijan. In particular, the passage of most of the runoff during the summer months and the acute water shortage that occurs during the period of increased demand in the summer are some of the main poles of the problem. Consequently, additional measures to regulate river flow are necessary. River flow regulation can be achieved through both artificial and natural means. Artificial flow regulation is accomplished through the construction of reservoirs. However, the construction of artificial reservoirs is costly and associated with serious environmental problems. Natural flow regulation is achieved through groundwater feeding rivers and creates conditions for a relatively uniform flow distribution throughout the year. Assessing baseflow (the proportion of groundwater recharge) in rivers is considered a complex area of hydrological research, but it has significant scientific and practical significance for more effective and integrated water resources management. Assessing baseflow is also a crucial procedure for designing and forecasting artificial flow regulation.

This article proposes a new formula for calculating the volume of groundwater in rivers. The results were achieved by synthesizing the advantages of post-Soviet, Western, and Eastern scientific approaches in this field, based on the analysis of dozens of parameters reflecting air and soil moisture during processing. The assessment mechanism, based on space data and GIS technologies, enables highly accurate calculation of river groundwater flow volumes in any natural conditions, even without observation data and without spatial and temporal constraints. Due to their high level of innovation, the obtained results were also included in a set of important scientific proposals by the US Natural Resources Conservation Service (US NRCS).