Phoenix Chapter

Looking Ahead…

• May: PFAS update with Jojo Tannen
• June: Beer tasting at the Greenwood Brewery
• July: Summer break
• August: Lightening talks with Kelly Mott LaCroix, USFS
• September: Groundwater Modeling with Sorab Panday, GSI
• October: ASU Flow 2024
• November: TBD
• December: Holiday party fundraiser (location TBD)

Abstract: How Climate Change and Human Activities are Shaping Global Freshwater Availability

Over 20 years of data from the NASA GRACE and GRACE Follow-On missions have provided unprecedented insights into the dynamics of freshwater availability in the 21st Century and the unquestionable role of climate change and human water management. In this presentation, Dr. Famiglietti will review the key hydrological findings from the missions and discuss how they have driven my current focus on urgently needed, solutions-oriented research for water management, the food-energy-water nexus, climate adaptation, and raising public awareness. The importance of engaged research, transdisciplinary partnerships, and scalable innovation has never been greater.

Recent examples will be presented, including in finance, technology, policy, social-ecological systems, and science communication, along with emerging plans for their integration in the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative.

Famiglietti and his research team use satellites to track changing water availability around the world. They pioneered the methods to detect groundwater depletion from space using the NASA GRACE mission. They have been working for many years towards improving hydrological prediction in climate models like those used in the IPCC. This work has driven his interest in global groundwater sustainability, the food-water nexus, corporate water sustainability and stewardship, innovations in financial tools and data-driven reporting platforms, and international water diplomacy.

Speaker: Jay Famiglietti

Jay Famiglietti is a Global Futures Professor in ASU’s School of Sustainability and the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. He is Professor Emeritus from the University of Saskatchewan, where he was executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security, and where he held the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He was the founding Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley Y-Combinator tech startup, Waterplan. He also served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

From 2013 through 2018, Famiglietti was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the California State Water Boards in the Santa Ana and Los Angeles regions. From 2001 to 2016, he taught earth system science and civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, where he founded the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling. Before joining UCI in 2001, he was on the faculty of the Geological Sciences Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he helped launch the program in climate and the UT Environmental Science Institute.

Famiglietti is a former Chair of the Board of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), a former editor-in-chief of Geophysical Research Letters, and he has been a Visiting Professor at in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University and UCLA. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and of the Geological Society of America, a recipient of AGU’s Hydrological Sciences Award, and a Distinguished Alumni of Tufts University.

Famiglietti is committed to science communication. He is regular advisor to state, provincial, U.S., Canadian and world leaders on regional and global water issues, he appears as a featured expert in television and film, and he hosts the podcast “What About Water?” He and his research group have published numerous papers and reports, and their work has been featured in major international news media.