Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing to Water Governance and the Mitigation of Climate Change Effects

• Main Authors: Ali, Ilham, Famiglietti, Jay, McLelland, Jonathan
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Center for Open Science 2020
• Subjects: Ocean acidification
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.31237/osf.io/49nre

Water stress in both surface and groundwater supplies is an increasing environmental and sustainable management issue. According to the UN Environment Program, at current depletion rates almost half of the world's population will suffer severe water stress by 2030. This is further exacerbated by climate change effects which are altering the hydrologic cycle. Understanding climate change implications is critical to planning for water management scenarios as situations such as rising sea levels, increasing severity of storms, prolonged drought in many regions, ocean acidification, and flooding due to snowmelt and heavy precipitation continue. Today, major efforts towards equitable water management and governance are needed. This study adopts the broad, holistic lenses of sustainable development and water diplomacy, acknowledging both the complex and transboundary nature of water issues, to assess the benefits of a “science to policy” approach in water governance. Such negotiations and frameworks are predicated on the availability of timely and uniform data to bolster water management plans, which can be provided by earth-observing satellite missions. In recent decades, significant advances in satellite remote sensing technology have provided unprecedented data of the Earth’s water systems, including information on changes in groundwater storage, mass loss of snow caps, evaporation of surface water reservoirs, and variations in precipitation patterns. In this study, specific remote sensing missions are surveyed (i.e. NASA LANDSAT, GRACE, SMAP, CYGNSS, and SWOT) to understand the breadth of data available for water uses and the implications of these advances for water management. Results indicate historical precedent where remote sensing data and technologies have been successfully integrated to achieve more sustainable water management policy and law, such as in the passage of the California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014. In addition, many opportunities exist in current transboundary and interstate ...