GC31H-01
Satellite Observations of Groundwater Storage Variations and Their Application for Water Security Monitoring
Wednesday, 16 December 2015: 08:00
2022-2024 (Moscone West)
Matthew Rodell1, James S Famiglietti2, Bailing Li3, Sujay Kumar1 and John T Reager II4, (1)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (2)University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States, (3)NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (4)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States
Abstract:
Fresh water demand is steadily increasing around the world due to population growth, economic development, and people’s desire for a “western” lifestyle and diet. Where surface water availability is not sufficient or consistent, groundwater is often the resource of choice for agriculture, industry, and municipal and domestic uses. However, unlike lake levels, aquifer levels are unseen and are not easily measured. This can create the illusion of an infinite water source and impede efforts to monitor and conserve groundwater. Moreover, even where depth-to-water measurements do exist, they often are not digitized, centralized, and accessible. The GRACE satellites are a partial solution to this problem, enabling space-based estimates of groundwater variability at regional scales that are not limited by political boundaries. Here we discuss emerging trends in groundwater storage around the world based on GRACE observations and how they can be combined with other information in order attribute these apparent trends and support sub-regional scale analyses of changing groundwater availability.
