Earth Sciences Remote Sensing Lab
Earth Sciences Remote Sensing Lab |
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Demand for freshwater supplies in arid and semi-arid countries worldwide is on the rise because of increasing populations and limited water supplies. This problem is exemplified in countries of Saharan Africa (North Africa) and the Middle East. Faced with overpopulation problems and demand for development of new agricultural lands to support its increasing population, Egypt adopted aggressive policies to develop new agricultural communities outside the overpopulated Nile Delta and Nile Valley. Almost all of these projects rely on the exploitation of the River Nile waters, despite the fact that Egypt is using nearly its full share of the Nile River waters (55.5 billion cubic meters per year). Examples of these projects include El Salam Canal, which will convey mixed agricultural drainage water and Nile River water to the Sinai Peninsula, and the Tushka Canal, which will divert Nile River water from Lake Nasser to the nearby area in the Western Desert. There is an urgent need for Egypt to develop alternative water resources if it were to pursue its ambitions for continued agricultural development and prosperity. To address this need, we are assessing alternative water resources in Egypt, using Sinai as our site area. We are building on research funded by the United Nations Development Program / GEF to develop reliable techniques for evaluating the extent of renewable ground water resources in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and to evaluate the source(s) of the groundwater, and its extent. We are using the acquired expertise and to refine the newly developed methodologies to locate and assess the renewable groundwater resources in Sinai. We are investigating two main potential water resources in Sinai:
We are applying integrated methodologies involving the use of isotopic techniques (O,H), remote sensing, field, meteorologic, and surface runoff studies to locate reservoirs in question and to assess their ground water potentiality.
The project is
jointly
conducted by scientists from the Department of Geosciences, Western Michigan
University and the Irrigation and Hydraulics Department, Faculty of
Engineering, Cairo University.
Collaborator: Dr. Ahmed Wagdy,
Cairo University Funded By: NSF International
Program
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