A paper led by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPS), and recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience, took a global count of the storage and flow of Earth’s rivers.
The team estimated the total volume of freshwater in rivers – called river storage – between 1980 and 2009, and mapped the results for the planet’s main hydrological regions. Follow the results below.
Largest freshwater storage is in Brazil
The researchers considered how much water some river basins receive and how much of it goes out into the oceans. With this, they created two maps. In the first one below, the amount of storage by hydrological regions that contain one or more river basins is shown. The darker shades of blue represent the largest storages.
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 has around 7.05 million square kilometers (around 4 million are in Brazilian territory) and has great potential for generating electrical energy.
As can be seen, the Amazon Basin is the region with the largest river storage, retaining around 850 cubic kilometers of water – approximately 38% of the global estimate. It is also possible to see the amount of water in other river basins in Brazil, such as in the Northeast and South regions.
Tea Amazon Basin is of great importance as it supplies cities and riverside populationsits water is used for domestic activities, for agriculture and local livestock, and also for the production of inputs for immediate consumption in cities and livestock raising.
The study also mapped and quantified water discharge from rivers to the oceans, as seen in the second map (below). The regions marked in gray exemplify the intense use of water by humans – these are called ‘fingerprints’. They consist of highlighting areas where a smaller amount of water leaves the rivers than entered.
The Amazon River Basin is also the basin that discharges the most water into the ocean. In total, there are 6,789 thousand cubic kilometers of water per year, which is equivalent to 18% of global discharge.
On this map, you can see the regions depleted by the intense use of watersuch as the Colorado River Basin (in the United States), the Amazon Basin itself (negative discharge), the Orange River Basin, in southern Africa, and also the Murray-Darling Basin in southeastern Australia.
All of this data was calculated based on information from measuring stations that monitor around three million river segments around the world.
General river monitoring
The study also estimated that the total volume of water in the planet’s rivers from 1980 to 2009, on average, was 2,246 cubic kilometersand a global continental flow of 37,411 km³/year.
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Accurate assessment of global river flows and reserves is critical to inform water management practices. So, for scientists, this information is important, as it can guide water management actions around the worldespecially at a time of population growth and climate change.
News 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.
