The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a joint satellite mission by NASA and the German space agency DLR, tracks freshwater availability over the globe. And according to hydrologist James Famiglietti at the University of California, Irvine, it's not revealing a pretty picture. His team has observed steadily declining groundwater reserves in many of the world's major aquifers, particularly those in the arid and semi-arid parts of the globe. Between 1994 and 2006, annual fresh-water flow increased 18% suggesting an acceleration in the global water cycle of evaporation and rainfall.
__* Translation: More intense storms, flooding, and drought.*__A redistribution of precipitation from the mid latitudes to higher and lower latitudes means that wet regions get wetter and dry get drier. Famigliette's research is among the first to demonstrate that these conditions--previously predicted by climate models--are already happening. And this isn't just a story about available drinking water because it causes tremendous concerns about food, energy, economic, and international security. It's also among the myriad of challenges that lead me to push for more research on drought tolerant transgenic crops.
Famiglietti and his team expect that the changes they are observing will make water management far more difficult in the coming decades. Potential solutions include conservation and more efficient water use, in particular in agriculture, realistic pricing for water, new agreements for 'transboundary' water sharing, and increasing the number of facilities for water recycling. Desalination may also play a critical role in easing water shortages, provided that energy costs and brine disposal can be accommodated in a sustainable manner.
