A science communication tool to bring awareness to recent trends in water availability around the world.
This project is based on and inspired by @ed_hawkins's awesome #ShowYourStripes global warming awareness-building initiative. Although global water availability has been tracked for a much shorter period of time (only since 2002) compared to temperature, these water availability stripes can help to raise the profile of global water security challenges and complement the #WarmingStripes initiative by bringing attention to the linkages between water availability and climate change.
Explore the map below, click on the basin whose stripes you want to see/download, and then pick the color palette you want. 
Data
Water availability data come from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory GRACE and GRACE-FO Mascon solutions.  GRACE/GRACE-FO Mascon data are available at: http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov

Major basins of the world come from the World Bank's Data Catalog, and are available at:
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/major-river-basins-world
Methods & code
  • JPL Mascon monthly solutions of terrestrial water storage (water availability) anomalies (i.e. deviation from normal) are area-averaged for each world basin whose geometry is simplified to the JPL solution resolution of 0.5 degrees.
  • The color scale is based on the standard deviation in monthly water availability anomalies over baseline time period (2004-2009). Color scale maxima are set to 2.6 times this standard deviation in both the positive and negative direction. This means the color scale is different for each river basin and thus they should not be compared. Instead, use the stripes as a visualization of how water availability has changed in a given basin relative to its 2004-2009 mean and standard deviation.
  • Code on GitHub: https://github.com/XanderHuggins/WaterStripes​
Still curious?