India may spend as much as 50 billion rupees ($1 billion) in the next five years to map underground water as indiscriminate sinking of wells by farmers depletes resources in the world’s second-most populous nation.

The government’s goal is to avert a water crisis in the South Asian country, where agriculture accounts for 20 percent of the $1.7 trillion economy, Mihir Shah, a member of the Plan ... read more >>

James Hansen, in his 2009 book Storms of my grandchildren, describes his experience trying to convince policy-makers of the seriousness of our climate challenge while at the same time seeking to raise public awareness. ... read more >>

Drought loosened its grip on the southern U.S. Plains over the past week after moderate to heavy rains across Texas and surrounding states, although rainfall totals over the past six months remained below normal, according to climate experts. ... read more >>

Thick ice closed vast swathes of the Danube on Thursday, crippling shipping on Europe's busiest waterway, as the death toll from bitter cold across the continent rose to at least 460. ... read more >>

In the last ten years, scientists have shown that it is possible to detect falling snow and measure surface snowpack information from the vantage point of space. But there remains much that is unknown about the fluffy white stuff. ... read more >>

From TheWaterChannel. This video, produced by the UK Groundwater Forum, helps explain the important role that groundwater plays in the environment. The video shows the contribution groundwater makes to the flow in Britain’s rivers and in doing so provides some basic information on groundwater, subsurface dynamics and the hydrological cycle as a whole.

You can also access other similar videos ... read more >>

ppropriate post for New Year's Eve - resurrection of memories. What brings this about? Read on.
David Zetland sent me this photo the other day. He's currently vacationing in Egypt.

The sign conjured memories of my Fall 1995 sabbatical at Egypt's Research Institute for Groundwater, one of the twelve institutes of the National Water Research Center of the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigat ... read more >>

Early last year, deep in the forests of northern British Columbia, workers for Apache Corp. performed what the company proclaimed was the biggest hydraulic fracturing operation ever.

The project used 259 million gallons of water and 50,000 tons of sand to frack 16 gas wells side by side. It was "nearly four times larger than any project of its nature in North America," Apache boasted.
The rec ... read more >>

The Nubian Aquifer, the font of fabled oases in Egypt and Libya, stretches languidly across 770,000 square miles of northern Africa, a pointillist collection of underground pools of water migrating, ever so slowly, through rock and sand toward the Mediterranean Sea.

The aquifer is one of the world’s oldest. But its workings — how it flows and how quickly surface water replenishes it — have bee ... read more >>

Congratulations to Richard Vijgen, the winner of the HeadsUp! 2011 visualization contest, announced on December 7th by contest organizers Peggy Weil and Visualizing.org. Contestants, who were design professionals and students, used real groundwater data, including our groundwater depletion estimates derived from NASA GRACE observations, to produce informative and visually-stimulating animations ... read more >>