 Home > Water Sustainability
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Water Sustainability:
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Water is the “blood-supply” of civilization and needs to be properly managed, especially in this era of uncertainty related to climate change and a growing population. The Earth just surpassed 8 billion people, and each individual requires water every day to survive. Without sufficient water, civilizations and ecosystems cannot exist. Public health, environmental, security, nutrition, and energy industries are each critically dependent upon sustainable water supplies. Groundwater basins are currently under threat by overdraft because of water level reduction due to over-pumping. As such, well installers are having to drill deeper and deeper and costs to access usable water are increasing. In coastal regions, seawater intrusion is occurring, contaminating wells and harming the adjacent soil with salt, rendering critical crop growing areas unusable for agriculture. In rivers and streams located in regions with extensive groundwater pumping, flows are depleted, resulting in devastation to ecosystems and costly legal battles. There is an urgent need for superior and sustainable water management.
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The key to resolving these very important challenges has to do with collecting appropriate data from meaningful locations at the correct frequency, rapidly processing this data, and immediately converting this into palatable easy-to-understand information that triggers immediate action. Current practices and methods do not allow for rapid response to catastrophic threats via basin overdraft, seawater intrusion or stream depletion – and we are running out of time. Fortunately, with the confluence of sensors, telemetry, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud based real-time processing, visualization and automated response, we can implement technology to resolve these critical challenges. For instance, WSP provides real-time monitoring and response to forecast when and where water resource threats will emerge given current pumping scenarios, water levels and well-defined sustainability objectives. Similarly, GBST is a groundwater supply accounting system that rapidly (within seconds) tells stakeholders about the current supply status, changes between any two selected times, whether critical threshold levels are about to be exceeded and whether groundwater basins are on target to meet future supply needs. WSP and GBST represent two viable solutions to directly address critical water supply challenges today and well into the future.
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Contact Groundswell for additional information.
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GBST Derived Critical Surface Analysis. Multiple threshold levels can be entered into GBST to establish early warning levels and to demonstrate when key water supply objectives are being met. This feature also reports the amount of available water supply above the critical threshold.
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