• Making the Globe our Backyard !

Global Water Information through Spatial Data
and Knowledge gateways @ IWMI

Water Use Trends over Space and Time through
Global Maps, Statistics, and Models

The overarching goal of the Global Water Information is to produce a series of global water and water related maps, models, and statistics over space and time and link this information to climate change. The central idea is to develop a state-of-art global water information center (GWIC) that will study water use trends of the past, present, and the future and help us understand linkages between water use, land utilization for purposes such as irrigation, population growth, environmental demands, and sustainable growth. Overwhelming emphasis will be placed on use of spatial data from remote sensing and GIS (RS\GIS).

Our broader vision will lead to production of a suite of Global Public Good (GPG) products relating to water use and management leading to a global water information center (GWIC). The GWIC agenda will produce comprehensive set of global products that will help us understand how, where, and for what the water is used in the past, present, and future. The GWIC products will be ideal for use in scenario models or projecting trends. These data will be spatial, provided in consistent formats, and in various resolutions.

Already, IWMI has made rapid advances in producing suite of global water and water related data and has released a number of widely used spatial data gateways.

In the near future, a number of advances in global water information are planned. This will include:

• Global irrigated area maps at higher resolutions (e.g., 500 m, 30 m);
• Global map of rainfed croplands at higher resolutions (e.g., 500 m, 30 m);
• Global water body map;
• Land use change maps;
• Agroecological zone maps;
• Global water productivity maps and models;
• Irrigation potential map for Africa;
• Global drought frequency or likelihood map;
• Water use map for the irrigated areas; and
• Relationship between population and irrigated areas;v

The GWIC products, listed above, can be fed into Google as a single mega-file of 100s of datalayers. The idea will be to generate the above GPGs at various scales or resolutions. The product line will look at trends from 1970s to present and in 30 m to 10 km resolution.

The idea is also to feed the GWIC maps, statistics, and models into Google Earth which has revolutionized the way we can look at the Planet Earth. Its streaming technology allows us to ?call up? any part of the Planet Earth to ?pop up? and ?zoom in? within seconds

The easy felicitation of looking at any part of the World in great detail and within seconds, has opened gateway to create a truly digital World to help us understand, monitor, and study Planet Earth.

The expectation is to seamlessly use these Google GPGs to model, build scenarios, visualize, and inform public. Indeed, ideally an online tool box or a software that will help analyze multiple data layers and provide best answers to numerous questions for any target area or for the entire World. This will facilitate, for example, rapid action required at times of disasters and to use them in action plans related to global health, sustainable development and climate change.

What is not currently understood and appreciated is the flood gates that Google has opened up for scientists and researchers from around the World to monitor, study, understand, and protect the Planet Earth through serious scientific research by: (A) using Google Earth Data and (B) Contributing to Google Earth Data. The IWMI GWIC idea is to produce water related products at global level that can be assimilated and analyzed using Google Earth to facilitate answers for a common man as well as advanced research scientist from any part of the globe instantly through online browsing, querying, and analysis.

The global water information will be a partnership effort involving IWMI, numerous advanced research centers (e.g., NASA, USGS), Center for excellence education institutes (e.g., Yale university, University of New Hampshire, University of North Dakota, Boston University), CGIAR centers (ICARDA, CIAT, IRRI), and national centers of excellence (e.g., Chinese Academy of Sciences and Indian Council for Agricultural Research).