Visualizing The Cost of Urban Water. Sept 2011 Water scarcity overtakes global warming as top environmental concern. Discovery Of Massive Aquifers Could Be Game Changer For Kenya : The Two-Way. Hide captionMembers of the El Molo tribe are pictured in the village of Komote, on the shores of Lake Turkana, northern Kenya, last year.
Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images Members of the El Molo tribe are pictured in the village of Komote, on the shores of Lake Turkana, northern Kenya, last year. Satellite imagery and seismic data have identified two huge underground aquifers in Kenya's drought-prone north, a discovery that could be "a game changer" for the country, NPR's Gregory Warner reports. The aquifers, located hundreds of feet underground in the Turkana region that borders Ethiopia and South Sudan, contain billions of gallons of water, according to UNESCO, which confirmed the existence of the subterranean lakes discovered with the help of a French company using technology originally designed to reveal oil deposits.
The Lotikipi Basin Aquifer is located west of Lake Turkana, the world's largest permanent desert lake, which nonetheless contains alkaline and unpalatable water. Water and Conflict in Asia? Water security is emerging as an increasingly important and vital issue for the Asia-Pacific region.
Perhaps no other resource—other than oxygen—is so intricately linked to human health and survival. However, as the region’s population growth continues to surge, the demand for water is increasing substantially, without a concomitant increase in water resources. Many Asian countries are beginning to experience moderate to severe water shortages, brought on by the simultaneous effects of agricultural growth, industrialization, and urbanization. In recent years, moreover, evidence indicates that water security is becoming increasingly affected by erratic weather patterns, most notably the El Nino and La Nina weather phenomena. Several countries in the region, including Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, have experienced droughts of such severity that they have caused food shortages and have threatened the long-term food supply.
The world’s freshwater supply is finite. Agriculture. Projected world water scarcity 2025 - Full size. Water supply, sanitation and hygiene development. Worst drought in decades hits Brazil's Northeast. Warmer is not always wetter. Not all warming is the same.
For the same increase in temperature, global warming caused by greenhouse gases results in less rainfall than does warming caused by the sun’s radiation, climate simulations suggest. Because wet places should get more rain as the climate heats up, the new results may explain the mystery of why a warm period 1,000 years ago was wetter than the warm late 20th century. Jian Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing and colleagues describe these results in the Jan. 31 Nature.
“If what they show holds up, it’s good news in that it helps reconcile an apparent contradiction,” says oceanographer Gabriel Vecchi of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. But it would also limit how scientists can use some past episodes of climate change as analogs for the future, he says.
In turn, these heat differences appear to affect temperatures in the Pacific. Water Shortage, Drinking Water Crisis Solutions. Water Scarcity. Types of Drought. Research in the early 1980s uncovered more than 150 published definitions of drought.
The definitions reflect differences in regions, needs, and disciplinary approaches. Wilhite and Glantz1 categorized the definitions in terms of four basic approaches to measuring drought: meteorological, hydrological, agricultural, and socioeconomic. The first three approaches deal with ways to measure drought as a physical phenomenon. The last deals with drought in terms of supply and demand, tracking the effects of water shortfall as it ripples through socioeconomic systems. Meteorological Drought Sequence of drought occurrence and impacts for commonly accepted drought types.
Meteorological drought is defined usually on the basis of the degree of dryness (in comparison to some “normal” or average amount) and the duration of the dry period. Agricultural Drought Hydrological Drought Socioeconomic Drought 1Wilhite, D.A.; and M.H.