Water accounting in the Jordan River Basin: water sensing for remote productivity

The Jordan River Basin is the most important water resource shared between the Middle East countries: Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Its surface water and groundwater have been highly exploited and fought over throughout history. The diverse climate over its area results in spatially variable precipitation and evapotranspiration, thus, variability of water generation and consumption. To be able to manage the water resources in a sustainable manner, it is important to understand the current state of the water resources. However with limited up-to-date ground observations, in terms of duration, completeness and quality of the hydro-meteorological records it is difficult to draw an appropriate picture of the water resources conditions. The Water Accounting Plus (WA+) system designed by IHE Delft with its partners FAO and IWMI has been applied to gain full insights into the state of the water resources in the basin