A paper led by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPS), and recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience, made it possible to inventory on a global scale the storage and flow of the planet’s waterways.
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The team estimated the total volume of fresh water in the rivers – called river storage – between 1980 and 2009, and mapped the results for the major hydrological regions of the planet. See the results below.
Brazil has the largest fresh water reservoir
The researchers studied the amount of water received by certain river basins and the amount of water that flows into the oceans. They thus created two maps. The first shows the amount of water stored by hydrological regions that contain one or more river basins. The darkest shades of blue represent the largest storage areas.
The Amazon Basin, or Amazon River Basin, is located in several countries in South America. It is the largest river basin in the world and the one with the highest water density. It covers approximately 7.05 million square kilometers (of which approximately 4 million are in Brazilian territory) and has great potential for electricity production.
As you can see, The Amazon basin is the region that stores the most water, with about 850 cubic kilometers of water, or about 38% of the global estimate. You can also see the amount of water in other river basins in Brazil, especially in the Northeast and South regions.
The Amazon basin is of great importance because it supplies cities and local populations, its water is used for domestic activities, for local agriculture and livestock, as well as for the production of inputs intended for immediate consumption in cities and for livestock.
The study also made it possible to map and quantify the discharge of water from rivers into the oceans, as shown in the second map (below). The regions marked in gray illustrate intensive human use of water – these are called “fingerprints”. They consist of highlighting areas where the quantity of water leaving the rivers is less than that entering them.
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The Amazon River basin is also the one that dumps the most water into the ocean. In total, it releases 6,789,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, which is equivalent to 18% of global emissions.
On this map, you can see the regions depleted by intensive water use, such as the Colorado River Basin (in the United States), the Amazon Basin itself (negative discharge), the Orange River Basin in South Africa and also the Murray-Darling Basin in southeastern Africa. ‘Australia.
All of these calculations are based on medical information that is monitored by very thousands of segments of the rivers and the world.
General monitoring of watercourses
The study also estimated that the total volume of water in the world’s rivers between 1980 and 2009 averaged 2,246 cubic kilometers and the overall continental flow was 37,411 km³/year.
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Accurately assessing the flows and reserves of the world’s rivers is essential to inform water management practices. For scientists, this information is therefore important, because it can guide water management actions around the world, particularly in times of population growth and climate change.
Article references:
JPL/NASA. “Global Accounting of Earth’s River Storage and Flow”. 2024.
Collins, E.L. et al. Global patterns in river water storage depend on residence time. Nature Geoscience2024.
