A new study using data from a pair
of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the
arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the
past decade, U.S. space agency NASA announced Tuesday.
Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center; and the National Center for Atmospheric
Research, found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that
parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates
river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of
total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the
Dead Sea.
The findings, to be published Friday in the journal Water
Resources Research, are the result of one of the first comprehensive
hydrological assessments of the entire Tigris- Euphrates-Western
Iran region. Because obtaining ground-based data in the area is
difficult, satellite data, such as those from NASA' s twin Gravity
Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, are essential.
GRACE is providing a global picture of water storage trends and is
invaluable when hydrologic observations are not routinely collected
or shared beyond political boundaries.
The team calculated about one-fifth of the observed water losses
resulted from soil drying up and snowpack shrinking, partly in
response to the 2007 drought. Loss of surface water from lakes and
reservoirs accounted for about another fifth of the losses. The
majority of the water lost -- approximately 73 million acre feet (90
cubic kilometers) -- was due to reductions in groundwater.
"GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water
storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently
have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth,
after India," said Jay Famiglietti, principle investigator of the
study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine. "The rate was
especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for
freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its
water management because of different interpretations of
international laws."
Famiglietti said GRACE is like having a giant scale in the sky.
Within a given region, rising or falling water reserves alter
Earth's mass, influencing how strong the local gravitational
attraction is. By periodically measuring gravity regionally, GRACE
tells us how much each region's water storage changes over time.
"GRACE really is the only way we can estimate groundwater storage
changes from space right now," Famiglietti said.
