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India a ‘Hotspot’ of Freshwater Overuse, Satellite Data Says

India a ‘Hotspot’ of Freshwater Overuse, Satellite Data Says

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The overuse of water resources has caused a serious decline in the availability of freshwater in India, according to a study that used an array of NASA Earth-observing satellites to reach its conclusion.

Scientists led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in the US used data on human activities to map locations where freshwater is changing around the globe.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found that Earth’s wetland areas were getting wetter and dry areas were getting drier due to a variety of factors, including human water management, climate change and natural cycles.

Areas in northern and eastern India, the Middle East, California and Australia were identified as ‘hotspots’ where the overuse of water resources had set the availability of freshwater back, The Guardian had reported.

In northern India, groundwater extraction for irrigation of wheat and rice crops has caused a rapid decline in available water, despite rainfall being normal throughout the period studied, the report noted.

Its authors said, “The fact that extractions already exceed recharge during normal precipitation does not bode well for the availability of groundwater during future droughts.”


Also read: The Indus and Ganges-Brahmaputra basins are drying up faster than we’d like


They used 14 years of observations from the US/German-led Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft mission to track freshwater trends in 34 regions around the world.

“This is the first time that we have used observations from multiple satellites in a thorough assessment of how freshwater availability is changing everywhere on Earth,” Matt Rodell, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, said.

On land, freshwater is one of the most essential of Earth’s resources, for drinking water and agriculture. While some regions’ water supplies were relatively stable, others experienced increases or decreases. “What we are witnessing is major hydrologic change,” said Jay Famiglietti, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena.

“We see a distinctive pattern of the wet land areas of the world getting wetter – those are the high latitudes and the tropics – and the dry areas in between getting dryer. Embedded within the dry areas we see multiple hotspots resulting from groundwater depletion,” he continued.

While noting that water loss in some regions, like the melting ice sheets and alpine glaciers, is clearly driven by warming climate, Famiglietti said more time and data will be needed to determine the forces driving other patterns of freshwater change.

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