Critical analysis of hydrological mass variations of northwest India

Abstract

With current climate change, water availability is a huge concern. Ground-water (GW) is depleting at a steep rate globally and more specifically in Northwest India. Estimation and analysis of GW availability would be of great use for formulating a proper water management plan for the future. The study is carried out in the north-western part of India with the aim of generating a time series for total water storage (TWS) using different remote sensing and model-based data like GRACE, Landsat, MODIS. From the time series, it is clear-cut that, the TWS is showing a declining trend and this might be due to depletion of groundwater as, other variables like precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture (obtained from MERRA-2 and CFSR data) are not showing any negative trend during the study period (2002 - 2021). Also, from the change detection analysis of land use land cover maps and crop yield statistics of water-intensive crops it can be concluded that croplands in the study area are increasing denoting the usage of water for irrigation at a large scale. Thus, better management of the groundwater is required for avoiding severe water scarcity in the future.