Groundwater depletion the world over poses a far greater threat to global water security than is currently acknowledged.

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The global groundwater crisis

Freshwater availability is changing worldwide. Here we quantify 34 trends in terrestrial water storage observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites during 2002–2016 and categorize their drivers as natural interannual variability, unsustainable groundwater consumption, climate change or combinations thereof. Several of these trends had been lacking thorough investigation and attribution, including massive changes in northwestern China and the Okavango Delta. Others are consistent with climate model predictions. This observation-based assessment of how the world’s water landscape is responding to human impacts and climate variations provides a blueprint for evaluating and predicting emerging threats to water and food security.

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Emerging trends in global freshwater availability.

Groundwater depletion (GWD) compromises crop production in major global agricultural areas and has negative ecological consequences. To derive GWD at the grid cell, country, and global levels, we applied a new version of the global hydrological model WaterGAP that simulates not only net groundwater abstractions and groundwater recharge from soils but also groundwater recharge from surface water bodies in dry regions. A large number of independent estimates of GWD as well as total water storage (TWS) trends determined from GRACE satellite data by three analysis centers were compared to model results. GWD and TWS trends are simulated best assuming that farmers in GWD areas irrigate at 70% of optimal water requirement. India, United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China had the highest GWD rates in the first decade of the 21st century. On the Arabian Peninsula, in Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mozambique, and Mongolia, at least 30% of the abstracted groundwater was taken from nonrenewable groundwater during this time period. The rate of global GWD has likely more than doubled since the period 1960–2000. Estimated GWD of 113 km3/yr during 2000–2009, corresponding to a sea level rise of 0.31 mm/yr, is much smaller than most previous estimates. About 15% of the globally abstracted groundwater was taken from nonrenewable groundwater during this period. To monitor recent temporal dynamics of GWD and related water abstractions, GRACE data are best evaluated with a hydrological model that, like WaterGAP, simulates the impact of abstractions on water storage, but the low spatial resolution of GRACE remains a challenge.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2014WR015595

Global-scale assessment of groundwater depletion and related groundwater abstractions: Combining hydrological modeling with information from well observations and GRACE satellites

Recent developments in mascon (mass concentration) solutions for GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite data have significantly increased the spatial localization and amplitude of recovered terrestrial Total Water Storage anomalies (TWSA); however, land hydrology applications have been limited. Here we compare TWSA from April 2002 through March 2015 from (1) newly released GRACE mascons from the Center for Space Research (CSR-M) with (2) NASA JPL mascons (JPL-M), and with (3) CSR Tellus gridded spherical harmonics rescaled (sf) (CSRT-GSH.sf) in 176 river basins, ∼60% of the global land area. Time series in TWSA mascons (CSR-M and JPL-M) and spherical harmonics are highly correlated (rank correlation coefficients mostly >0.9). The signal from long-term trends (up to ±20 mm/yr) is much less than that from seasonal amplitudes (up to 250 mm). Net long-term trends, summed over all 176 basins, are similar for CSR and JPL mascons (66–69 km3/yr) but are lower for spherical harmonics (∼14 km3/yr). Long-term TWSA declines are found mostly in irrigated basins (−41 to −69 km3/yr). Seasonal amplitudes agree among GRACE solutions, increasing confidence in GRACE-based seasonal fluctuations. Rescaling spherical harmonics significantly increases agreement with mascons for seasonal fluctuations, but less for long-term trends. Mascons provide advantages relative to spherical harmonics, including (1) reduced leakage from land to ocean increasing signal amplitude, and (2) application of geophysical data constraints during processing with little empirical postprocessing requirements, making it easier for nongeodetic users. Results of this product intercomparison should allow hydrologists to better select suitable GRACE solutions for hydrologic applications.

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Global Evaluation of New GRACE Mascon Products for Hydrologic Applications

The Tibetan Plateau (TP), the highest and largest plateau in the world, with complex and competing cryospheric‐hydrologic‐geodynamic processes, is particularly sensitive to anthropogenic warming. The quantitative water mass budget in the TP is poorly known. Here we examine annual changes in lake area, level, and volume during 1970s–2015. We find that a complex pattern of lake volume changes during 1970s–2015: a slight decrease of −2.78 Gt yr−1 during 1970s–1995, followed by a rapid increase of 12.53 Gt yr−1 during 1996–2010, and then a recent deceleration (1.46 Gt yr−1) during 2011–2015. We then estimated the recent water mass budget for the Inner TP, 2003–2009, including changes in terrestrial water storage, lake volume, glacier mass, snow water equivalent (SWE), soil moisture, and permafrost. The dominant components of water mass budget, namely, changes in lake volume (7.72 ± 0.63 Gt yr−1) and groundwater storage (5.01 ± 1.59 Gt yr−1), increased at similar rates. We find that increased net precipitation contributes the majority of water supply (74%) for the lake volume increase, followed by glacier mass loss (13%), and ground ice melt due to permafrost degradation (12%). Other term such as SWE (1%) makes a relatively small contribution. These results suggest that the hydrologic cycle in the TP has intensified remarkably during recent decades.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2017GL073773

Lake volume and groundwater storage variations in Tibetan Plateau's endorheic basin

[1] Changes in regional groundwater storage in North China were estimated from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites data and ground-based measurements collected from 2003 to 2010. The study area (∼370,000 km2) included the Beijing and Tianjin municipality, the Hebei and Shanxi province, which is one of the largest irrigation areas in the world and is subjected to intensive groundwater-based irrigation. Groundwater depletion in North China was estimated by removing the simulated soil moisture changes from the GRACE-derived terrestrial water storage changes. The rate of groundwater depletion in North China based on GRACE was 2.2 ± 0.3 cm/yr from 2003 to 2010, which is equivalent to a volume of 8.3 ± 1.1 km3/yr. The groundwater depletion rate estimated from monitoring well stations during the same time period was between 2.0 and 2.8 cm/yr, which is consistent with the GRACE-based result. However, the estimated groundwater depletion rate in shallow plain aquifers according to the Groundwater Bulletin of China Northern Plains (GBCNP) for the same time period was only approximately 2.5 km3/yr. The difference in groundwater depletion rates estimated from GRACE and GBCNP data indicates the important contribution of groundwater depletion from deep aquifers in the plain and piedmont regions of North China.

Lemoine J.-M.

Papers

Evaluation of groundwater depletion in North China using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data and ground-based measurements (EI)