Water for Humanity

More than one billion people are today without access to sufficient clean and healthy drinking water, and this number is likely to increase dramatically over the next decades. As pointed out by the 2006 Water Report of the United Nations, this is not so much a problem of abundance but rather of insufficient governance. Responsible regional water management will be essential for satisfying the demand for drinking water. Currently, regional water management is hampered by a lack of sufficient observations of the terrestrial water storage, above as well as below the surface. A much improved observation system providing information on all reservoirs of the water cycle on regional to local scales is needed, if we want to avoid severe human and ecological disasters cause by inappropriate water management.

The goal of the IGCP 565 Project is to utilize the Global Geodetic Observing System for monitoring of the mass transport in the water cycle, particularly on regional scales. Geodetic observations of the changes in time in Earth's gravity field, shape, and rotation capture the signals of redistribution of water mass on the globe. The dramatically increased accuracy of the geodetic techniques of the last three decades carries a great potential for measuring water mass as it is cycles from one reservoir to another. The project will, with a series of five annual workshops and a number of associated research projects, explore this potential and aims to provide, at the end, useful products to regional water management, particularly in developing countries.

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Latest News:

[15 August 2010] Deadline for abstract submission extended: The deadline for abstract submission for the third IGCP 565 Project Workshop has been extended to August 31, 2010. The workshop will be held in Reno, Nevada, on October 11-13, 2010. More information is available at the Workshop Web Page.

[30 March 2010] Third IGCP 565 Project Workshop will be held in Reno, Nevada: The third IGCP 565 Workshop will be held on October 11-13, 2010 and hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno. More information is available at the Workshop Web Page.

[18 December 2009] IGCP 565 Project meeting took place in San Francisco: A IGCP 565 Project meeting took place on December 12-13, 2009 in San Francisco with participation from South Africa, Australia, the U.S., and France. The participants reviewed the project status and prepared the Workshops in 2010 and 2011. More information, including all presentations, is available at the Workshop Web Page.

[10 October 2009] Second IGCP 565 Workshop took place: The Second IGCP 565 Workshop of the IGCP 565 Project "Developing the Global Geodetic Observing System into a Monitoring System for the Global Water Cycle" took place on September 30-October 2, 2009 in Graz, Austria. The workshop "Towards a roadmap for future satellite gravity missions" was organized together with the Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) and the space agencies NASA and ESA. The immediate outputs of the workshop include a roadmap defining the strategic traget and describing the activities required to reach this target and a declaration for the next Plenary meeting of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). This Plenary meeting will take place on November 17-18, 2009 in Washington, D.C. The roadmap will also be presented at the next GRACE Science Team Meeting on November 5-6, 2009 in Austin, TX (see GSTM).

The full workshop documentation is available at the Workshop web page.