Author(s): Mohamed Saber, Sameh A. Kantoush, Tetsuya Sumi
Linked Author(s): Mohamed Saber
Keywords: Water resources management, GRACE, GLDAS, Arab region, total water storage, groundwater
Abstract: Water scarcity is a critical issue in the Arabian countries. Water resources are subjected to threats such as natural variability, pollution, overexploitation and climate changes. Therefore, proposing and developing good management strategies for the available water resources are urgently needed to overcome the water demand for increasing the population and industrialization as well as urbanization. The sustainable water management is hindered by the data deficiency, and water variability and in some cases due to the political situation. Therefore the main goal of this research is to use the Satellite Remote Sensing Data (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment; GRACE) and Global Land Data Assimilation (GLDAS) to assess and evaluate the total water storage variability over the Arabian countries due to their limited water resources. The total water storage anomalies were estimated from GRACE showing that most of the Arabian countries are suffering from declining and decreasing the total water storage within the time period from 2002-2015. Besides, the same situation was observed from the groundwater storage estimated from both GRACE and GLDAS. It was found that groundwater storage and soil moisture exhibit high spatiotemporal variability from one country to the others. A comparison study between all the countries was conducted in terms of total water storage and groundwater variability. The present study provide some implications and results which in turn will be a guide for all stakeholders including government, civil society and the private sector to develop control and manage their water availability based on this long term analysis. The method is characterized by providing spatiotemporal maps for water storage changes over all Arabian countries using Satellite products of GRACE and GLDAS data
Year: 2017