Global Earth Observation project for integrated water resource assessment

About

“Global Earth Observation for Integrated Water Resource Assessment” is a collaborative project funded under the EU DG Research FP7 programme. The overall objective is to contribute to the assessment of global water resources through the use of new Earth Observation datasets and techniques. ICARDA will publishing a case-study in Morocco dowscaling the developed products to verify their usability for improving the efficiency of regional water distribution.

Impact

Goals

Earth2Observe will support efficient and globally consistent water management and decision making, by extending and improving the state-of-the-art in EO products of key water cycle components including precipitation, evaporation, soil moisture, groundwater and water quality. This will increase the availability of large-scale water dataset. Different case studies demonstrate the usefulness of the integrated water resources time series at the operational level via regional and local case studies.

Objectives

EartH2Observe will integrate available EOs, in-situ datasets and hydrological models to construct a consistent global water resources reanalysis dataset of sufficient length. The resulting datasets will be made available through an open Water Cycle Integrator data portal: GEOSS/WCI. ICARDA takes part in the downscaling of the data for application in case-studies at regional and local levels to optimize the EO products based on local needs for water management and decision making.

Impact pathways

The EartH2Observe project cuts across the scientific themes of both earth observation and water resources management. It is expected that the project will have an impact on Earth Observation research by improving the overall retrieval, resolution and reliability of EO data, assess the performance and uncertainty of existing EO products via ground validation and increase the space-time coverage of satellite sensors. Besides, the project will improve the global water resources evaluation by building long time series of water cycle observations and bridging the scale and the context from global to local, from science to society. Work Package 6 of the eartH2Observe project - which is the part where ICARDA is involved - focusses on in-situ data collection and modelling. It will evaluate the applicability of the new EO data and improve the assessment and prediction of water resources variability and availability. To end, the project wants to raise awareness on the pressure on freshwater resources, to improve the understanding of the water cycle by providing workshops, training and e-learning courses. Promoting a participatory approach and supporting local stakeholders, the project contributes to science-policy interfacing.