Rapid screening of operational fresh water availability using global models: A pilot study

With an increasing global population and higher standards of living, governments, farmers, and energy producers are wondering how much water they can use to run their business in the future; a future that will be affected by climate change as well as socio-economic change. Global and regional trends in climate change and water availability abound on the internet, but estimates of water availability with operational relevance have been unavailable.
Over the last decade global hydrological models have shown increasing skill in representing hydrological processes, including the water demands of irrigation, industry, and households. Recently, global groundwater modeling has been added to the large-scale modeling suite. With a wealth of information in global models, we developed and tested a methodology to extract surface water availability, and groundwater availability with operational relevance using global models. Perhaps the most exciting use of global models is that they can be used anywhere on the globe, also in areas where few data are available, and that they can be coupled to climate models to look into the future.
The method was applied to seven Shell assets in The Netherlands, Germany, United States and Canada. We found that surface water availability can be determined with operational relevance using existing models. Our results also show that global groundwater models need more refinement before their predictions of groundwater availability become operationally relevant. Here, inclusion of existing subsurface information and additional local information (boreholes, pumping tests) are deemed a necessity.