Middle East River Basin Losing Water at Rapid Rate: NASA

A recent study by NASA published in the journal Water Resources Research highlights the rapid loss of freshwater from the Middle East river basin in the past decade, almost the size of the Dead Sea.

Based on the comprehensive hydrological assessments of the entire Tigris-Euphrates-Western Iran region, researchers have found that nearly 60 percent of the loss is due to the growing demand of groundwater and the impact of the 2007 drought.

The study was conducted by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; University of California at Irvine; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. For the study, scientists used NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to assess the region. A total of 117 million acre of stored freshwater is lost from these regions.

A global picture of the water storage trends is identified with GRACE. This is more helpful when the hydrologic observations are not collected regularly.

"GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India," Jay Famiglietti, principle investigator of the study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine, said in a press statement.

After the 2007 drought, the rate of water loss increased. There is no end for the need of freshwater in these regions. And the region fails to cooperate with water management due to the different understandings of international laws.

The rate at which the region's water storage changes over time is presented by GRACE, which periodically measures the gravity regionally. GRACE also assisted the researchers in estimating the variations in the groundwater storage.

Nearly one-fifth of the water losses were a result of soil drying up and snowpack melting, including the 2007 drought. The loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs summed up to another fifth of the loss. Meanwhile, majority of the loss, close to 73 million acre feet, was caused due to the gradual decline in the groundwater reductions.

The amount of water lost is more than enough to meet the needs of a hundred million people in the region each year. The Middle East experiences less rainfall and above all, does not have that much water to begin with. The arid areas are getting even drier, Famiglietti continues to say. 

Scientists hope that this study highlights the importance of on-the-ground water monitoring, reports redOrbit.