Acute Water-Scarcity Monitoring for Africa
by
Amy McNally 1,*
, Kristine Verdin 1, Laura Harrison 2, Augusto Getirana 3, Jossy Jacob 4, Shraddhanand Shukla 2, Kristi Arsenault 1, Christa Peters-Lidard 5 and James P. Verdin 6
Amy McNally 1,*, Kristine Verdin 1, Laura Harrison 2, Augusto Getirana 3, Jossy Jacob 4, Shraddhanand Shukla 2, Kristi Arsenault 1, Christa Peters-Lidard 5 and James P. Verdin 6
1
SAIC, Reston, VA 20190, USA and NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
2
UC Santa Barbara Climate Hazards Center, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
3
UMD ESSIC, College Park, MD 20740, USA and NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
4
SSAI, Lanham, MD 20706, USA and NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
5
NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
6
USAID Office of Food for Peace, Washington, DC 20004, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Water 2019, 11(10), 1968; https://doi.org/10.3390/w11101968
Received: 15 August 2019 / Revised: 11 September 2019 / Accepted: 18 September 2019 / Published: 21 September 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Water Supply and Water Scarcity)
Acute and chronic water scarcity impacts four billion people, a number likely to climb with population growth and increasing demand for food and energy production. Chronic water insecurity and long-term trends are well studied at the global and regional level; however, there have not been adequate systems in place for routinely monitoring acute water scarcity. To address this gap, we developed a monthly monitoring system that computes annual water availability per capita based on hydrologic data from the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) Land Data Assimilation System (FLDAS) and gridded population data from WorldPop. The monitoring system yields maps of acute water scarcity using monthly Falkenmark classifications and departures from the long-term mean classification. These maps are designed to serve FEWS NET monitoring objectives; however, the underlying data are publicly available and can support research on the roles of population and hydrologic change on water scarcity at sub-annual and sub-national scales.
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Keywords:
drought; early warning; water scarcity; water supply; routine monitoring; hydrologic modeling; remote sensing; GIS
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
McNally, A.; Verdin, K.; Harrison, L.; Getirana, A.; Jacob, J.; Shukla, S.; Arsenault, K.; Peters-Lidard, C.; Verdin, J.P. Acute Water-Scarcity Monitoring for Africa. Water 2019, 11, 1968.
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