Global monthly water stress: 1. Water balance and water availability

Surface fresh water (i.e., blue water) is a vital and indispensable resource for human water use in the agricultural, industrial, and domestic sectors. In this paper, global water availability is calculated by forcing the global hydrological model PCR‐GLOBWB with daily global meteorological fields for the period 1958–2001. To represent blue water availability, a prognostic reservoir operation scheme was included in order to produce monthly time series of global river discharge modulated by reservoir operations. To specify green water availability for irrigated areas, actual transpiration from the model was used. Thus, the computed water availability reflects the climatic variability over 1958–2001 and is…

• UU
  Universiteit Utrecht