The following NASA press release discusses the most recent  national groundwater map from the GRACE satellite, showing the extent of groundwater depletion due to drought in Texas.

(Eurekalert.org) The record-breaking drought in Texas that has fueled wildfires, decimated crops and forced cattle sales has also reduced levels of groundwater in much of the state to the lowest levels seen in more than 60 years, according to new national maps produced by NASA and distributed by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The latest groundwater map, released on Nov. 29, shows large patches of maroon over eastern Texas, indicating severely depressed groundwater levels. The maps, generated weekly by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., are publicly available on the Drought Center’s website.

“Texas groundwater will take months or longer to recharge,” said Matt Rodell, a hydrologist based at Goddard. “Even if we have a major rainfall event, most of the water runs off. It takes a longer period of sustained greater-than-average precipitation to recharge aquifers significantly.”

The maps are based on data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which detect small changes in Earth’s gravity field caused primarily by the redistribution of water on and beneath the land surface. The paired satellites travel about 137 miles (220 km) apart and record small changes in the distance separating them as they encounter variations in Earth’s gravitational field.

To make the maps, scientists used a sophisticated computer model that combines measurements of water storage from GRACE with a long-term meteorological dataset to generate a continuous record of soil moisture and groundwater that stretches back to 1948. GRACE data goes back to 2002. The meteorological data include precipitation, temperature, solar radiation and other ground- and space-based measurements.

The color-coded maps show how much water is stored now as a probability of occurrence in the 63-year record. The maroon shading over eastern Texas, for example, shows that the level of dryness over the last week occurred less than two percent of the time between 1948 and the present.

The groundwater maps aren’t the only maps based on GRACE data that the Drought Center publishes each week. The Drought Center also distributes soil moisture maps that show moisture changes in the root zone down to about 3 feet (1 meter) below the surface, as well as surface soil moisture maps that show changes within the top inch (2 cm) of the land.

“All of these maps offer policymakers new information into subsurface water fluctuations at regional to national scales that has not been available in the past,” said the Drought Center’s Brian Wardlow. The maps provide finer resolution or are more consistently available than other similar sources of information, and having the maps for the three different levels should help decision makers distinguish between short-term and long-term droughts.

“These maps would be impossible to generate using only ground-based observations,” said Rodell. “There are groundwater wells all around the United States and the U.S. Geological Survey does keep records from some of those wells, but it’s not spatially continuous and there are some big gaps.”

The maps also offer farmers, ranchers, water resource managers and even individual homeowners a new tool to monitor the health of critical groundwater resources. “People rely on groundwater for irrigation, for domestic water supply, and for industrial uses, but there’s little information available on regional to national scales on groundwater storage variability and how that has responded to a drought,” Rodell said. “Over a long-term dry period there will be an effect on groundwater storage and groundwater levels. It’s going to drop quite a bit, people’s wells could dry out, and it takes time to recover.”

The maps are the result of a NASA-funded project at the Drought Center and NASA Goddard to make it easier for the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor to incorporate data from the GRACE satellites. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., developed GRACE and manages the mission for NASA. The groundwater and soil moisture maps are updated each Tuesday.

The NBII provided a program for access to data and information related to the nation’s biological resources and led several geospatial efforts including the FGDC Biological Data Profile for Geospatial Metadata,  and the Geospatial Interoperability Framework.

More information on the termination can be found at the NBII termination web page.

The Southern Great Plains Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool (SGP CHAT) is a dynamic online mapping application created by a coalition of Great Plains states to provide information on lesser prairie-chicken (LEPC) habitat, and other species in coming years. It covers those portions of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas that fall within the historic range of the LEPC. Representatives from each state worked together to acquire the best biogeophysical data available for the region to model the habitat probability and identify important movement corridors within and between meta populations.

Southern Great Plains Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool

Image from e360.yale.edu

This summer, researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science pioneered a new airborne LiDAR based mapping system capable of mapping forest structure to 10cm and detecting dozens of other signals, including “photosynthetic pigment concentrations, water content of leaves, defense compounds like phenols, structural compounds such as lignin and cellulose, as well as phosphorous and other micronutrients — all of which can be used to build signatures to distinguish individual plant species”. The system was deployed over the Amazon rainforest in Peru enabling the team to map over 100,000 acres per day. In combination with extensive ground surveys to identify plant signatures, they were able to use the data to remotely identify hundreds of plant species based on their spectral signatures.  The full story was recently published in Yale Environment 360.

The Soil and Water Resources Conservation Act (RCA) authorizes USDA to report on the condition of natural resources and to analyze conservation programs and opportunities. In support of the RCA effort, USDA has launched the RCA Data Viewer. The site contains a wealth of information from Fiscal Years 2005-2010 for both viewing and downloading. Information was gathered from, the National Conservation Planning Database, the Natural Resources Inventory (NRI), the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) reports, the Ag Census and the Economic Research Service.

You can access information on how natural resource conservation program dollars have been obligated, data on applied conservation by program and by resource concern, NRI and CEAP reports, and state-level Census of Agriculture data summaries. Users can tailor the information available on the RCA Data Viewer to their own needs and interests. Data are available at the State, Regional (Farm Production Region, or CEAP Region), and National levels.

To access the RCA Interactive Data Website, use the following steps:

Go to

www.nrcs.usda.gov

 On the left side (under ‘Browse by Subject’) click the “Technical Resources” link.

On the Technical Resources page, there is a section on the right labeled “Highlights” click on the “Resources Conservation Act” link.

Scroll down the page to “RCA Data Sources.”

Click on the RCA Interactive Data Viewer Link.

Read the 4 basic steps and then you’re ready to “start RCA.”

This data viewer will be updated and expanded on a continuing basis. Questions and suggestions for improvements can be directed to Dan Mullarkey (SSRA-RAD), NRCS RCA Coordinator, at (301) 504-2344 or Daniel.mullarkey@wdc.usda.gov.

NEON data and infrastructure will be made available to researchers, educators, students, decision makers, and the public.  This will include airborne LiDAR and Infrared sensors, satellite data, continental land use and land cover change, and arrays of ground-based sensors measuring the atmosphere, soils and water.

“The ideal study site will contain habitats linked by corridors, and will also contain two types of reference conditions: (1) habitat patches that are separated by approximately the same Euclidean distance as the patches linked by the corridor, and (2) a continuous expanse of habitat large enough to contain sampling locations as large and as widely separated as the patches connected by the corridor.”

The objectives of this research project are to determine if conservation corridors work and to catalog the characteristics of corridors that do work.  To learn more, you can download their full paper, Desperately seeking stable 50-year-old landscapes with patches and long, wide corridors.