Use of abstraction and discharge data to improve the performance of a national‐scale hydrological model
Ponnambalam Rameshwaran, Victoria A. Bell, Matthew J. Brown, Helen N. Davies, Alison L. Kay, Alison C. Rudd, Catherine Sefton
2021
Water Resources Research
Over the last century, anthropogenic use of water rose dramatically (UN-Water, 2020) enabled by the development and usage of pumps to extract groundwater (de Graaf et al., 2019; Shah et al., 2001) . In the 21st century, global projected population growth and climate change are together expected to intensify the demand for water and lead to greater pressures on available freshwater resources (UNDP, 2006). Water abstraction (also known as water withdrawal) is the process of removing water from a
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... urface water source (such as a river, stream, lake, or reservoir) or from an underground source (aquifer) or from a tidal water source, either permanently or temporarily. Typically, abstracted water is used for agricultural (irrigation, livestock, and aquaculture), industrial, or municipal (direct use by the population) purposes (FAO, 2016) . Abstracted water can be returned to the land (e.g., by irrigation) and to rivers (e.g., through discharges from waste water, sewage treatment processes, and industry). Abstracted water returned to the land is largely lost from the catchment through evaporation and transpiration processes. In the 20 th century, the global freshwater withdrawal for agriculture, industry, and municipal uses was estimated to have intensified by a factor of six (UN-Water, 2020) as a result of global population and economic growth, and technological advances. FAO (2011) indicates that the global renewable water resource is about 42,000 km 3 year −1 , of which about 3,900 km 3 year −1 is abstracted from surface water and underground sources, 70% for use by the agricultural sector, 19% by the industrial sector, and 11% by the municipal sector. The spatial and temporal distribution of a country or region's water resources can play an important role in environmental, political, and economic sustainability (OECD, 2016), particularly when water is scarce. Anthropogenic water use often reduces water availability, but reliable data to monitor and quantify this water use is often lacking in those countries where it is most needed. For example, spatiotemporal water use data are not generally available for water resource-stretched regions such as South Asia and the African continent, but they are available for most European countries, the Americas,
doi:10.1029/2021wr029787
fatcat:xb44vt4ddzd5ragjxqw3dtmava