University of California, Irvine
IN-4: Innovation 4

Knowledge gained from viewing the Earth’s water-stressed aquifers from the vantage point of space led UC Irvine Professor Jay Famiglietti to embark on a global outreach campaign to call attention to the critical need to better manage the world’s available water resources across geo-political lines with the goal of sustaining the world’s water supply well into the future. Famiglietti, founding director of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling, is a Professor of Earth System Science and Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Irvine. He and his research team pioneered the use of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission satellites to identify “hotspots of water stress” around the world, including those areas where on-the-ground research can be difficult for political, economic, or security reasons. Findings published in 2011 confirmed that most of these locations are associated with groundwater depletion. Observing the results “was like watching a Polaroid develop,” he says in the documentary film “Last Call at the Oasis.” “All of sudden, you have a complete picture. It’s like an omigod moment; you realize: I can’t believe this is happening, and I need to tell somebody about it.” One of the visuals in question was shared on huge electronic billboards in New York City’s Times Square beginning on World Water Day on March 12, 2012, and running several times a day for a month.

Most recently, Famiglietti’s team confirmed that the Tigris and Euphrates watershed – from Turkey upstream to Syria, Iran and Iraq below – lost 117 million acre feet, nearly equivalent to all of the water in the Dead Sea, between 2003 and 2009. They attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of water from underground aquifers. It is his team’s assessment that the water situation in the Middle East will only degrade with time, primarily due to climate change. See http://news.uci.edu/press-releases/middle-east-river-basin-has-lost-dead-sea-sized-quantity-of-water/

Closer to home, Famiglietti’s team has developed models showing that evaporation from agricultural irrigation in California’s Central Valley is pumping more moisture into the atmosphere, actually strengthening the intensity of storms in the southwestern U.S monsoon region, including increasing runoff back to the Colorado River. Predicted changes to the water table in California will ultimately impact millions of people in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix whose water supply comes from the Colorado River basin. See http://news.uci.edu/press-releases/central-valley-irrigation-intensifies-rainfall-storms-across-the-southwest-2/

Whether here in the United States or in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world, the time to work cooperatively toward regional water management solutions is now – before water scarcity exacerbates regional conflict, Famiglietti says. To press his point, Famiglietti recently gathered a small team and headed to the Middle East for two weeks in February 2013 on a “water diplomacy visit” to Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. The purpose of the trip was to present new research results and to explore developing new scientific collaborations, including capacity building and two-way data exchanges on water trends in the Middle East. This first trip enabled them to establish relationships with key stakeholders and launch a discussion about the regional tools, research, and data needed to best enable peaceable cooperation on Middle East water management. For more information, see Famiglietti’s blog posts in National Geographic’s Water Currents section at http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/22/weighty-water-matters-in-the-middle-east/

UC Irvine has not previously received a STARS innovation credit fort his practice, policy, program, or outcome.