Geostatistical methods in water resources

Water is the most essential resource for the presence of life. Consequently, humanity is completely dependent on this natural resource so that an accurate estimation of both the quantity and the quality of water resources is crucial. Unfortunately, as it is the case for many natural resources, the available data are generally scarcely observed over space and time which geopardizes a proper and accurate estimation of water resources. Consequently, there is thus a real need for methods that can deal with such incomplete datasets. Incidentally, geostatistics has been developed for the analysis of scarcely observed variables in a space-time context. It gathers numerous methods and approaches that all aim at providing space-time estimations for the variables at ungauged location by accounting for the space-time dependence between these variables and those at gauged location. This paper intends to present, through various examples of applications, how the geostatistical methods have contributed to a better understanding of water resources around the world. Each section is dedicated to a particular water resource and regroups the different applications in which geostatistics methods have been applied. These sections aren’t meant to be exhaustive but illustrative. A final section presenting a list of useful software and toolboxes has also been added.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource