The Human Fingerprint on the Water Landscape of the 21st Century
Jay Famiglietti
Wednesday, 17 Oct 2012 at 7:00 pm – Sun Room, Memorial Union
Jay Famiglietti uses satellite remote sensing to track water availability and groundwater depletion on land. His work is aimed at improving hydrological prediction in weather and climate models. He will discuss NASA's GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission and how the satellite images can be used to predict the future of water availability. The data collected raises important concerns for food production and economic and political security. Jay Familgietti is the 2012 Birdsall Dreiss Distinguished Lecturer with the Geological Society of America's Hydrogeology Division. He is a professor in Earth System Science and Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.Part of the Department of Geological & Atmospheric Sciences Distinguished Lecture Series.Over the last decade, satellite observations of Earth's water cycle from NASA's GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission, have provided an unprecedented view of global hydrological change and freshwater availability. Since its launch, the mission has helped to confirm that precipitation, evaporation and continental discharge rates are increasing, that the mid-latitudes are drying while the high and low latitudes are moistening, and that the hydrologic extremes of flooding and drought are becoming even more extreme. Importantly, GRACE has exposed the human fingerprint of water management practices such as groundwater use and reservoir storage, which raises many important issues for climate, water, food and economic security. Moreover, the GRACE mission has enabled us to peer beneath Earth's surface and characterize the worldwide depletion of groundwater aquifers, raising significant concerns about the potential for heightened conflict over transboundary water resources. In this talk I review the basics of how the GRACE mission observes terrestrial and global hydrology, what new information the mission has provided since its launch in 2002, and the implications for the future of water availability and sustainable water resources management.
Cosponsored By:
- Geological & Atmospheric Sciences
- Geological Society of America
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
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