News

2nd introductory webinar to the May 2022 International Conference
“Groundwater, key to the Sustainable Development Goals”
25 November 2021
14h30 – 16h30 CET
Register here

The 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by all UN Member States are our universal blueprint to protect the planet and to ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030.

Water cuts across all SDGs and the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation are central to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda. Water is crucial for advancing human rights, health, education, gender equality and work, as well as for food security, reducing poverty, tackling climate change, and enabling peace, justice, and sustainability. The eight
targets of SDG 6 on clean water and sanitation cover universal and equitable access to water, sanitation, and hygiene; water quality; water-use efficiency; integrated water resources management (IWRM); water-related ecosystems; international cooperation; and local participation. Beyond SDG 6, a dozen SDG targets are directly linked to freshwater.

Some 2.5 billion people depend solely on groundwater for their daily needs. The sustainable and science- based management of this precious resource is therefore key to achieving the SDG water-related targets.

• This webinar will explore the role and importance of the sustainable management of groundwater in the context of the SDGs and the SDG water-related targets, as well as underline the vital importance of preserving the quality and availability of groundwater in the face of climate change and increasing pressures on the resource.

• It will also update participants on the upcoming international Conference on Groundwater and the SDGs (‘Groundwater: Key to the Sustainable Development Goals’). The link of the conference is above. The conference is co-organized by the French Chapter of the International Association of Hydrogeologists (CFH-AIH), UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (UNESCO IHP), and the French Water Partnership (FWP), the Conference will take place in Paris on 18- 20 May 2022 under the patronage of the French National Commission for UNESCO and with the support of the French Ministry of the Ecological Transition, the Seine-Normandy Water Agency, and Sorbonne University.

• French/English simultaneous interpretation will be provided

The monitoring of water quality is extremely important for environmental, human and economic health. Coastal and inland water quality data are used to support water resource management and timely decision making. However, these data are scarce at the global, regional, and national levels, due to the lack of monitoring networks and capacity.

The number of studies about the use of Earth Observation for monitoring water quality in coastal and inland aquatic environments has grown in the last decade. However, the operational use of this technology is still limited, especially due to the lack of expertise and infrastructure to access, process, and utilize the Earth Observation data for local, regional, and national decision-making. To promote the use of Earth Observation as a decision-making tool, different programs have been developing Analysis-Ready Data (ARD) for water quality.

This Special Issue on “Analysis-Ready Data from Earth Observations for Water Quality: Development and Applications” is focused on studies that are using or developing ARD related to water quality. Therefore, studies developing, applying, calibrating, or validating ARD are encouraged to submit to this Special Issue. Some of the water-quality parameters that are of interest to this Special Issue, without being limited to, are the following:

• Aquatic Reflectance (or Remote Sensing Reflectance);
• Chlorophyll-a;
• Colored Dissolved Organic Matter;
• Phycocyanin;
• Total Suspended Solids;
• Trophic State Index;
• Turbidity;
• Water Temperature.

Dr. Igor Ogashawara
Dr. Carmen Castro-Cillero
Guest Editors

Find out more here:

The JCSDA is excited to announce the first public release of JEDI-MPAS to the community.

JEDI-MPAS is a multi-component software package that provides everything that is needed to run data assimilation applications for the atmospheric core of the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS).  The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the JEDI core team jointly develop JEDI-MPAS.

MPAS is a collaborative project for developing atmosphere, ocean and other earth-system simulation components for use in climate, regional climate and weather studies, whose primary development partners are Los Alamos National Laboratory and NCAR. The atmospheric core of MPAS solves the the fully compressible nonhydrostatic equations of fluid motion on an MPAS unstructured Voronoi mesh and offers a subset of the Advanced Research WRF physical parameterizations.  MPAS is used at NCAR for research into Earth-System predictability, spanning both weather and climate.

JEDI-MPAS employs MPAS’s native meshes, including regional and variable-resolution meshes, and performs I/O with native MPAS-A files.

Find out more here.

On behalf of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), it is my pleasure to announce the 14th Asia-Oceania Group on Earth Observations (AOGEO) Symposium to be held virtually from 10 to 12 November 2021. The Symposium is being organized by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan (MEXT) with support from the GEO Secretariat.  Find out more here