The Quality Of Groundwater Resources In Kuwait
The quality of groundwater resources in Kuwait varies spatially within the entire country. Isolated fresh water lenses are located in northern Kuwait mainly at the Raudhatain and Umm Al-Aish watersheds. Brackish groundwater zones are located in the central, western, and southwestern regions. However, the groundwater resources of remaining regions in Kuwait are highly saline (total dissolved soils: 200,000 TDS). In Kuwait, the fresh and brackish groundwater resource are used mainly for irrigation and domestic purposes. A great portion of potable water comes from desalination plants.
Groundwater resources are extremely vulnerable to natural and anthropogenic interventions. Anthropogenic forces include, but are not limited to, population growth, groundwater overexploitation, and groundwater quality degradation. For example, recent studies have indicated that Kuwait's population has increased by more than 16 times in 2018 compared to that of 1960 (1960: 265 × 106; 2018: 4.2 × 106). The population and living style changes, among others, are usually resulted in higher demands on the available natural resources.
Groundwater resources are among the most affected natural resources given the annual increase in groundwater consumption as well as the associated water quality degradation. Natural forces, on the other hand, include spatiotemporal variations in rainfall, amounts, patterns, and frequencies as well as temperature cyclicities, sea level rise, and desertification, and diversity losses. Recent climate change trends show a tendency towards greater extremes: arid or semi-arid areas are becoming increasingly drier and wet areas are becoming progressively wetter.
For instance, during the past 40 years, Kuwait’s global temperature has increased 1.5 °C to 2 °C, which is significantly higher than the global average. In addition, Kuwait’s average annual rainfall also declined from 200 mm in 1970 to 100 mm in 2000. Changes and rainfall and temperature, among other natural factors, are extremely affecting the groundwater resources in Kuwait.
Assessment, development, and management of Kuwait’s groundwater resources and quantifying their responses to natural and anthropogenic forces are extremely crucial to sustain Kuwait’s rapidly growing population and development needs. Field measurements (e.g., precipitation gauges, groundwater wells, etc.) required to monitor these resources, if available, suffer from discontinuity, inconsistency, and poor quality. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) offers a cost-effective alternative and/or complement to local filed measurements and could be used to monitor the Kuwait’s groundwater resources health and longevity.
For more than 15 years, the joint NASA (USA)/DLR (Germany) GRACE mission has monitored how mass is distributed within and between Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, groundwater, and ice sheets. The GRACE mission (4/2002 – 10/2017) is designed to map the Earth’s global static and temporal gravity fields with unprecedented accuracy. The GRACE mission consists of twin satellites flying in a polar orbit (altitude of 500 km), 220 km apart from each other, and interconnected by a K-band ranging.
The orbits of the two spacecraft are affected differently due2 / 2to the spatial and temporal variations in the Earth’s gravity field, which can increase or decrease the distance between them. These distance variations affect the travelling time of the K-band signals which are constantly being transmitted and received between satellites. Tracking the distance between the two satellite are used to quantify the temporal variations in Earth’s gravity field.
The GRACE-derived variabilities in Earth’s gravity field can be used to make global estimates of the spatiotemporal variations in the total vertically integrated components (e.g., surface water, groundwater, soil moisture and permafrost, snow and ice, wet biomass) of terrestrial water storage (TWS). GRACE is providing significant and practical strategies to routinely observe and monitor the groundwater resources across the entire planet. Given the impressive success of GRACE mission, GRACE-Follow On mission, launched in May 2018, will carry on the extremely successful work of its predecessor.
