Four international teams of researchers will receive $47 million over five years to advance global understanding of fresh water availability.

Schmidt Sciences’ new Virtual Institute for Earth’s Water (VIEW) will leverage AI and high-resolution data, including from NASA’s SWOT satellite, to build a first-of-its-kind ‘global fresh water ledger’.

That ledger will be a definitive account of the world’s freshwater resources to inform more effective, sustainable and equitable management.

While global temperatures are tracked with high precision, our understanding of the global water cycle remains fragmented.

Freshwater researchers — spread across disciplines from extreme precipitation to groundwater — have largely worked in isolation from one another, and from the energy and agriculture sectors whose futures depend on water.

Data are often scattered, inconsistent, and difficult to access, while the models scientists use to understand water availability have struggled to capture the full complexity of the water cycle.

The result is a critical gap between what we know and what we need to know to manage freshwater sustainably.

Water cycle insights

The four inaugural VIEW projects span a variety of investigations.

• RAWS (Re-Analysis of Water for Society), which produce the first high-resolution global picture of how the world’s freshwater resources have changed over the past 60 years.
• DARE (The Dynamic Atlas of Riverine Ecosystems and Infrastructure) will create the first global dataset tracking how river systems around the world have evolved under human influence since 1950.
• MountAInWater: Water from the Mountains — Global Reanalysis and Future Tipping Points, will deliver the first comprehensive global assessment of mountain water resources from 2000 to the present, evaluating the health of glaciers, snowpack, and downstream water supplies.
• Unlocking Local Knowledge Production for Global Water Reanalysis will develop new methods for incorporating community-collected data and local knowledge into global water models.

The teams will work together to integrate water data that captures both physical and societal processes that govern the water cycle — enabling new insights into the freshwater cycle and informing critical decisions surrounding the future of global water availability.

Essential element of life

“Rivers, lakes, streams and rain have guided the course of human history, nurturing communities and civilisations since our very beginnings, and yet we remain unsure about our own affect on fresh water,” said Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences.

“Schmidt Sciences’ Virtual Institute on Earth’s Water will deepen our understanding of this precious resource, how it moves through air, soil and watersheds, and how we can preserve this essential element of life.”

Following the selection of its inaugural cohort of projects, Schmidt Sciences is opening a second round of expressions of intent.

That second round is inviting researchers worldwide to submit proposals in two critical areas of the global water cycle — the balance between precipitation, evaporation and plant uptake; and the feedback loops and tipping points in the freshwater cycle.