Funding Agency: Collaborative Research Grants: U.S. – Egypt S&T Joint Fund
In the upcoming years, Egypt will be facing challenges meeting its increasing needs for fresh water resources, difficulties that will be soon compounded by the reduced River Nile flow due to the construction of the Renaissance Dam along the Blue Nile. We propose to address these challenges by: (1) delineating nearsurface natural discharge locations from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System (NSAS) in the Western Desert of Egypt using a wide range of static and temporal remote sensing data sets as these areas represent potential cost-effective agricultural development sites, (2) conducting geophysical investigations (VLF, resistivity) to verify and refine the remote sensing-based discharge areas (preliminary estimates: 51,000 km2), an area exceeding that of the Nile Delta, (3) geochemical analysis (anions, cations, natural radioactivity) to investigate the water quality, (4) hydrologic investigations to estimate sustainable extraction scenarios, and (5) additional landuse, soil, climatic, and morphologic studies to investigate the suitability of the selected areas. The project will be conducted jointly by researchers from Western Michigan University, National Authority of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences (NARSS), and Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation (MWRI).
Access to the online database: Egypt-Natural Groundwater Discharge