NASA Satellites Unlock Secret to Northern India's Vanishing Water (2009) | Hacker News Reader

NASA Satellites Unlock Secret to Northern India's Vanishing Water (2009)

nasa.gov

109 pointsuber1geek13 comments

This isn't news. My parents have a farm in northern Rajasthan. They use only groundwater for irrigation. Every few years since the early 80s, they've had to dig deeper and deeper wells because the wells keep running dry.

On the other hand, in Western Rajasthan, due to the canal coming down from Punjab, the groundwater is only a few feet deep in places; the land has become waterlogged.

Appears to be a 2009 article. Nonetheless it is a fact that people keep forgetting about. Our focus continues to be on the monsoon. If none, blame the gods. If it rains...enjoy. Harvesting, what?

yea from august 12 2009.

just saw elsewhere in news on April 3 2016 Uma Bharti/govt decided they will do something about water issues, only if the monsoon is light...

i dont think they are still understanding the problem ~6 years later.

other sources say israel is going to help india on water management?

and then if you want a more recent article on the matter: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35888535

Man this is so depressing. I wonder why Indian media focuses on other useless issue s when there is a huge crisis along the way...

They just create crisis and other issues to divert the attention of people.

it's mind-blowing how they can measures such subtle changes in the earth's gravitational field, AND they're already using this to acquire practical data

Even South Indian agricultural practices are not much different. As of now there is big water shortage in Hyderabad and I think South India also will also showup in NASA's next year pictures. Very depressing, and lets hope this will ring some bells and wake up some people.

I don't know why NASA is tracking these levels in India, but this is a huge wakeup call for the region and will help prevent a potential crisis (including economic crisis for India). These regions constitute a majority of agricultural regions in India.

"I don't know why NASA is tracking these levels in India"

Because's it's basically in their job description? https://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html#POLIC...

"...Objectives of Aeronautical and Space Activities. The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:

1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space. ..."

> I don't know why NASA is tracking these levels in India, but [...]

Well, if your low-flying and expensive satellite has to pass over the rest of the world anyway, you might as well record what it sees.

Quoth the article:

> With previous research in the United States having proven the accuracy of GRACE in detecting groundwater [researchers] were looking for a region where they could apply the new technique.

The reason is very simple. The best way to learn about an event is to observe an event. One of the most important thing that NASA does is collect data. That data can then be analyzed in the future to mitigate or prevent future problems.

The article is about 7 years old , couldn't find any recent data or study on the matter ??

More recent work by a portion of that same team, with much more information: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4626

GRACE has opened up this whole area over the last few years. It's very hard to monitor groundwater, even well data is not that usable for various reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com