Jorge Peña-Arancibia

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation | CSIRO · Division of Land and Water

The polders and islands in the salt-affected coastal zone of the Ganges Delta, home to approximately 15 million people in Bangladesh and 5 million in West Bengal, face challenges such as poverty, food insecurity, environmental vulnerability, and limited livelihood opportunities. Historically, agricultural production in these areas was mainly confin...

The coastal region of West Bengal, India, is vulnerable to the tropical cyclones from the Bay of Bengal often causing loss of life, infrastructure damage, agricultural devastation, and environmental degradation exemplified by the devastating impacts of Amphan in May 2020 and Yaas in May 2021. Considering the importance of accurately mapping flood e...

The Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS) in Pakistan is the largest contiguous irrigated system (~160,000 km 2) in the world. IBIS's crops sustain Pakistan's ~230 million people and provide a livelihood for ~90,000 farmers. Like many other irrigation systems around the world, IBIS is facing critical water management challenges, inter alia: (i) over...

The large areas being targeted for tropical forest restoration as part of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration will have major consequences for the flow of water through landscapes. Whilst the prevailing mantra that ‘more forest implies less streamflow’ remains true in terms of annual water yields, we demonstrate that opportunities for increased...

This paper presents findings from a stochastic benefit-cost analysis (BCA) using Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the probable values for net benefit and benefit cost ratio for a series of proposed strategic and operational water management options under climate change and socioeconomic development. The study is performed in the Tacna region in...

Satellite‐derived vegetation indices (VIs) provide a way to analyse vegetation phenology over decades globally. However, these data are often contaminated by different kinds of optical noise (e.g. cloud, cloud shadow, snow, aerosol), making accurate phenology extraction challenging. We present an open‐source state‐of‐the‐art R package called to ext...

Forest restoration is being scaled-up globally to deliver critical ecosystem services and biodiversity benefits, yet we lack rigorous comparison of co-benefit delivery across different restoration approaches. In a global synthesis, we use 25,950 matched data pairs from 264 studies in 53 countries to assess how delivery of climate, soil, water, and...

Understanding the historical and future spatio-temporal changes in climate extremes and their potential risk to rice production is crucial for achieving food security in Bangladesh. This paper presents results from a study on trend analysis for 13 climate metrics that significantly influence rice production. The analysis was conducted using the non...

This study assessed the extent and scale of groundwater declines and explored the drivers of these observed patterns. Trends in groundwater levels observed in 350 wells from 1985 through 2016 were assessed for statistical significance and classified by response type. It was found that 300 wells exhibited significantly declining trends of the minimu...

Pakistan relies greatly on the water of the Upper Indus basin (UIB) for its vast agriculture in the Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS). There are already concerns about the extent of unsustainable water use in the IBIS, particularly of groundwater, and these concerns are likely to increase in the future due to population increase and associated i...

Actual evapotranspiration (ETa) can be estimated using optical remote sensing and meteorological data. Herein we calibrated and applied the CMRSET (CSIRO MODIS Reflectance based Scaling EvapoTranspiration) model at the continental scale in Australia using five remotely sensed data products with spatial resolutions ranging from 500 meters (MODIS, VI...

In this report, we describe the implementation /development and evaluation of 2 models for land cover and cropping system analysis underpinned by remote sensing data. The models provide information on crop types and water use, as well as other land covers relevant to environmental monitoring in northwest Bangladesh. This is instrumental to assess c...

This summary for policymakers distils the key messages from the research project 'Sustaining groundwater irrigation for food security in the northwest region of Bangladesh' funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) of Australian Government and explains how the project has strengthened Bangladeshi researchers’ capacity to use scie...

In a recent paper published in this journal, Bretreger et al. (2020) estimate irrigation water use from satellite remotely sensed estimates of actual evapotranspiration in five irrigated districts of the Murray-Darling Basin (southeast Australia). They used three models that scale crop reference evapotranspiration with vegetation indices acquired b...

This manuscript presents examples of the modelling of the impacts of coal mining and coal seam gas extraction on streamflow in five study catchments in Australia. The manuscript includes details on data preparation and model set-up and calibration. The modelling methodology enables the prediction of cumulative impacts from multiple future coal reso...

In this report, we describe the development of a simple, lumped, monthly water balance model to assess the impact of climate change and agricultural development scenarios on water balances in the districts of northwest Bangladesh. The model inputs include monthly rain, monthly actual evapotranspiration derived from a daily crop water use model, tog...

The Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS) of Pakistan is a major user of surface and groundwater and provides food and economic security for about 207 million people. To assess the impact of agricultural development on water resources, we developed surface water balances for its canal commands and examined trends from 1981-82 to 2012-13. In this sem...

his paper develops a methodology to map the two main rice types in northwest Bangladesh from 1989 to 2016, when Green Revolution technologies and policies resulted in a 300% rice area expansion and localised unsustainable groundwater use. The mapping is performed for the largely irrigated dry season Boro rice (grown from November/December to May/Ju...

Evaluating irrigation performance in large systems is often limited by the availability of reliable water use data. Satellite-driven actual evapotranspiration (ETa) estimates are used herein as water use surrogates to assess the year-to-year inter-seasonal irrigation performance in 46 canal commands in the Indus Basin irrigated system (IBIS), the l...

Monthly actual evapotranspiration (ETa) computed with the CMRSET model at 500 m resolution. The monthly data spans from March 2000 to December 2018. The data is geographically limited to the area subtended by the 48 main canal commands in the IBIS. The data was produced to support water resources assessments and the IBIS water balance (see e.g. Ahm...

This paper presents an assessment of the hydrological impacts of proposed coal mines and coal seam gas (CSG) developments in the Gloucester, Hunter, Namoi and Galilee subregions of eastern Australia. Surface water and groundwater modelling was carried out to assess the cumulative regional-scale hydrological impacts of multiple coal and coal seam ga...

The Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS) in Pakistan, is the largest (~140,000 km2) irrigation system in the world. Crops grown in the IBIS provide food security for about 207 million people in Pakistan. Understanding the extent of crops and crop mix on a year-to-year basis is crucial for improving irrigation water management. A crop/land cover map...

Evapotranspiration is the largest water balance component in semi-arid irrigated systems. The Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS, ~140,000 km2) is the largest irrigated system in the world. Remote sensing can provide consistent and robust spatial estimates of evapotranspiration at spatiotemporal scales (<1000 m and monthly) that can be used to est...

We used measured estimates of rainfall, actual evapotranspiration, canal deliveries and change in groundwater levels to assess the water balance of the canal commands in Sindh, plus the Pat and desert canals in Balochistan that are supplied from the Guddu barrage in Sindh. The canal deliveries are the main supply of water into the canal commands, w...

We used measured estimates of rainfall, actual evapotranspiration, canal deliveries and change in groundwater levels to assess the water balance of the canal commands in Punjab. The canal deliveries are the main supply of water into the canal commands. The use of groundwater is important, with a large volume of groundwater pumped for irrigation, th...

In recent decades, increased groundwater use enabled a large areal increase in irrigated dry season crops in northwest Bangladesh. Concurrent declining groundwater levels across the region are of great concern for food security. A water balance model approach that considered changes in irrigated agriculture was implemented to assess changes over th...

Forests act as ‘pumps’ through their evapotranspiration (E tot ) and as ‘sponges’ by enhancing soil infiltration capacity and moisture retention. Tropical deforestation and poor post-forest land management generally result in lower E tot , but also reduce infiltration. Strongly diminished infiltration is typically accompanied by enhanced overland f...

The surface water numerical modelling for the Namoi region for the Bioregional Assessment is described in this report

The attached is one year of data - please follow the DOI URL for the complete dataset: http://doi.org/10.4225/08/5719A5C48DB85. The dataset contains global monthly 0.5 degree spatial resolution actual evapotranspiration and components (transpiration, soil evaporation, interception) from 1981 to 2012 inclusive. The estimates were computed through th...

Evapotranspiration (ET) is the process by which liquid water becomes water vapor and energetically this accounts for much of incoming solar radiation. If this ET did not occur temperatures would be higher, so understanding ET trends is crucial to predict future temperatures. Recent studies have reported prolonged declines in ET in recent decades, a...

Land surface and global hydrological models are often used to characterise global water and energy fluxes and stores and to model their future trajectories. This study evaluates estimates of streamflow and evapotranspiration (ET) obtained with a-priori parameterisation from a land surface model (CABLE) and a global hydrological model (H08) against...

PhD Thesis, 2013, King's College London, University of London

Precipitation estimates from reanalyses and satellite observations are routinely used in hydrologic applications, but their accuracy is seldom systematically evaluated. This study used high-resolution gauge-only daily precipitation analyses for Australia (SILO) and South and East Asia [Asian PrecipitationHighly-Resolved Observational Data Integrati...

[1] Ideally, a seasonal streamflow forecasting system would ingest skilful climate forecasts and propagate these through calibrated hydrological models initialized with observed catchment conditions. At global scale, practical problems exist in each of these aspects. For the first time, we analyzed theoretical and actual skill in bimonthly streamfl...

Streamflow data underpins rainfall-runoff model calibration. Generally, models are calibrated by minimising (e.g. using (non)linear least squares) the differences between observed streamflow and model estimates using objective functions. A required assumption to perform this minimisation is that the residuals are homoscedastic in nature. This assum...

Controlled experiments provide strong evidence that changing land cover (e. g. deforestation or afforestation) can affect mean catchment streamflow (Q). By contrast, a similarly strong influence has not been found in studies that interpret Q from multiple catchments with mixed land cover. One possible reason is that there are methodological issues...

Groundwater management in Australia is complicated by the cost and scarcity (vs. spatial variability) of bore monitoring. Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) remote sensing may alleviate this problem, but derived groundwater storage estimates are subject to errors, particularly, in total water storage (TWS) retrieval and in estimated so...

The Australian Water Resources Assessment system Landscape model (AWRA-L) aims to produce interpretable water balance component estimates covering all of Australia, and as much as possible agree with water balance observations, including point gauging data and satellite observations. The opportunities to evaluate AWRA-L water balance predictions in...

Controlled experiments have provided strong evidence that changing land cover (e.g. deforestation or afforestation) can affect the water balance. However a similarly strong influence has not been detected in analyses of collated streamflow data from catchments with mixed land cover. We tried to explain this "land cover paradox" using streamflow obs...

This paper analyses water availability and use within and between the Challenge Program on Water and Food basins. It describes the main features of water demand and supply in the basins and indicates where there are deficits and opportunities for development of water resources. A typology of basin water resources status uses a range of global spati...

Highlights ► Five methods used to assess deforestation impacts in seasonal tropical catchments. ► Annual and daily streamflow metrics examined pre- and post-deforestation. ► Climate and not land use change had overriding effect on catchment water yield. ► Inferred changes in streamflow dynamics due to deforestation using daily metrics.

Ideally, a seasonal streamflow forecasting system might be conceived of as a system that ingests skillful climate forecasts from general circulation models and propagates these through thoroughly calibrated hydrological models that are initialised using hydrometric observations. In practice, there are practical problems with each of these aspects....

The understanding of low flows in rivers is paramount more than ever as demand for water increases on a global scale. At the same time, limited streamflow data to investigate this phenomenon, particularly in the tropics, makes the provision of accurate estimations in ungauged areas an ongoing research need. This paper analysed the potential of clim...

The understanding of low flows in rivers is paramount more than ever as demand for water increases on a global scale. At the same time, limited streamflow data to investigate this phenomenon, particularly in the tropics, makes the provision of accurate estimations in ungauged areas an ongoing research need. This paper analysed the potential of clim...

Accurate and timely monitoring of natural and man-made water bodies is a critical input for water accounting and assessment. We aim to developing a methodology for a retrospective estimation of the area occupied by standing water in the Australian continent with a weekly to daily time-step. Available remotely sensed data present a trade-off between...

EXTENDED ABSTRACT During the past century some parts of Australia have experienced extended severe droughts affecting Australia's landscape, agricultural production and water resources. In addition, recent studies by CSIRO show that most Global Climate Models simulate decreases in future mean rainfall for most areas in Australia, with increases in...

There is much debate about the role of plantation forestry in southeast Australia in helping control stream salinity and in exacerbating stream flow reductions. We reviewed modelling tools developed to plan forestry for surface water and salinity outcomes and tested three of these in a multi-scale study within the Murray-Darling Basin, to assess th...