“With a changing climate, the increasing severity of flooding and drought, and unsustainable use of groundwater to meet increased food production demands due to population growth, the world’s freshwater resources are under a level of stress unseen before,” said Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
Famiglietti, the paper’s senior writer, was recently named U of S Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing, and will join GIWS effective July 1.
The Nature article, published online today, is based on an unprecedented level of data gathered using NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, other satellites and traditional sources. In this first-of-its-kind study, the authors relied heavily on observations by the GRACE mission of terrestrial water storage. The result is a startling new global map that depicts changing freshwater availability during the 2002-2016 period.
“Our study points to a distinctive, underlying pattern of the mid-latitude areas of the world getting dryer, while the bordering tropical and high latitude areas are getting wetter,” said Famiglietti.
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