In a new study by Ted Veldkamp (VU Amsterdam), Yoshi Wada et al. that appeared in Nature Communications it is shown, by using a multi-model ensemble from ISI-MIP 2a (PCR-GLOBWB among these), that human interventions in the global water system may decrease water scarcity upstream while aggravating water scarcity downstream.
The link to the paper can be found here!
Former members of our group Yoshihide Wada and Niko Wanders were involved in new high impact publications using PCR-GLOBWB:
Yoshi was co-author on a paper in Nature assessing how groundwater depletion is embedded in international food trade. See this link for a nice BBC news item.
Both Niko and Yoshi were involved in a GRL paper looking how water management can both mitigate and intensify hydrological drought. The PNAS website had a nice item about this work.
We are happy to announce that Inge de Graaf published a paper about our newly-developed global two-layer transient groundwater model. This version is coupled one-way with the global hydrology and water resources model PCR-GLOBWB. A newer version also has a two-way (at time-step) coupling with PCR-GLOBWB and will be reported on shortly. You can find the paper here!
Furthermore, Yoshihide Wada (vice-director Water at IIASA and senior research associate at UU) and colleagues published a new paper in Nature Geoscience in which they show from analyses of satellite and local well data spanning the past decade that long-term changes in monsoon precipitation are driving groundwater storage variability in most parts of India either directly by changing recharge or indirectly by changing abstraction.
Marc Bierkens has been elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
Citation: For contributions in understanding hydrological
processes across scales and the modeling
and analysis of climate change and human water use
on global groundwater stocks.
He will be honored at the current AGU General assembly.
See also this announcement or this issue EOS magazine!
Worldwide economic losses from river flooding could increase 20-fold by the end of the 21st century if no further actions on flood risk reduction are taken. Over 70% of this increase can be attributed to economic growth in flood prone areas
This follows from a recent study by a Dutch consortium that includes our research group.
See the study in Nature Climate Change!
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-12-climate-main-prone-areas.html#jCp
Marc Bierkens contributed the paper entitled “Global hydrology 2015: state, trends and directions” to the 50th anniversary of Water Resources Research special collection issue. The papers in this issue are freely downloadable!
Inge de Graaf , PhD student in our group has published a paper about a global 6-arcminute one-layer groundwater model. The model is made in MODFLOW and is forced with recharge and surface water levels from our global hydrological model. In this publication a steady state global groundwater depth map has been made, but in subsequent work Inge will provide an updated 5-arcminute two-layer version and transient runs, including the effects of groundwater abstractions.
The reference:
DHydrology Earth System Science, 19, 823-837.
The paper was highlighted at the EGU website:
A nice picture of the global groundwater table:
Long-term average groundwater depth (m below surface)
The World Resources Institute has launced the Aqueduct Global Flood Analyzer v1.0. It the first-ever public analysis of current and future river-flood risks worldwide.
The Analyzer estimates current and 2030 values for potential exposed GDP, affected population and urban damage from river floods for every state, country, and major river basin in the world.
The tool is based on a large number of runs with our global hydrological model PCR-GLOBWB from 1070-2030 using bias-corrected global climate models as inputs. These runs have been downscaled by Deltares and turned into flood risk (people and GDP affected) by IVM-VU University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and the under different socio-economic scenarios made by PBL- Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
See the blog post at WRI for more information.
The key findings are:
Key findings:
Increased flood expore by 2013
Today’s GDP exposed to river floods
Top 15 countries with greatest percentage of population exposed to river floods
See the publications supporting this research: Winsemius et al (2013) and Ward et al. (2014).
oman aqueduct of Luynes (Credit: Daniel Jolivet)
The Roman World used trade of grain (actual virtual water trade) as a means to be more resilient against climate change. At the same time, as population grew as a result of a steady supply of food, it became more dependent on trade and thus more sensitive to political or climatological disturbances of the trade network. These are the main conclusions from a study by
The Roman World used trade of grain (actual virtual water trade) as a means to be more resilient against climate change. At the same time, as population grew as a result of a steady supply of food, it became more dependent on trade and thus more sensitive to political or climatological disturbances of the trade network. These are the main conclusions from a study by Brian Dermody and coworkers from the Netherlands and the US.
The paper appeared in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences:
Dermody, B. J., van Beek, R. P. H., Meeks, E., Klein Goldewijk, K., Scheidel, W., van der Velde, Y., Bierkens, M. F. P., Wassen, M. J., and Dekker, S. C.: A virtual water network of the Roman world, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 18, 5025-5040, doi:10.5194/hess-18-5025-2014, 2014.
See the press release of EGU!
It got quite some media attention. For instance in Smithsonian Magazine.
Using a newly developed index and our group’s global hydrological model PCR-GLOBWB Yoshi Wada and Marc Bierkens assessed the amount of groundwater consumption coming from non-renewable sources as well as the amount of surface water consumption exceeding environmental flow limits. They calculated that this non-sustainable blue water use exceeds 30% of the current water consumption and that this number will rise to 40% towards the end of the 21st century. When combined with virtual water use, the index, called the blue water sustainability index (BlWSI), can also be used to assess which part of individual products is from sustainable water.
Wada, Y. and M.F.P. Bierkens, 2014. Sustainability of global water use: past reconstruction and future projections. Environmental Research Letters 9, 104003 (17pp).