Freshwater availability is changing worldwide. Here we quantify 34 trends in terrestrial water storage observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites during 2002-2016 and categorize their drivers as natural interannual variability, unsustainable groundwater consumption, climate change or combinations thereof. Several of these trends had been lacking thorough investigation and attribution, including massive changes in northwestern China and the Okavango Delta. Others are consistent with climate model predictions. This observation-based assessment of how the world's water landscape is responding to human impacts and climate variations provides a blueprint for evaluating and predicting emerging threats to water and food security.

A novel method is introduced for integrating satellite-derived irrigation data and high-resolution crop-type information into a land surface model (LSM). The objective is to improve the simulation of land surface states and fluxes through better representation of agricultural land use. Ultimately, this scheme could enable numerical weather prediction (NWP) models to capture land-atmosphere feedbacks in managed lands more accurately and thus improve forecast skill. Here, it is shown that the application of the new irrigation scheme over the continental United States significantly influences the surface water and energy balances by modulating the partitioning of water between the surface and the atmosphere. In this experiment, irrigation caused a 12% increase in evapotranspiration (QLE) and an equivalent reduction in the sensible heat flux (QH) averaged over all irrigated areas in the continental United States during the 2003 growing season. Local effects were more extreme: irrigation shifted more than 100 W m 22 from QH to QLE in many locations in California, eastern Idaho, southern Washington, and southern Colorado during peak crop growth. In these cases, the changes in ground heat flux (QG), net radiation (RNET), evapotranspiration (ET), runoff (R), and soil moisture (SM) were more than 3 W m 22 , 20 W m 22 , 5 mm day 21 , 0.3 mm day 21 , and 100 mm, respectively. These results are highly relevant to continental-to-global-scale water and energy cycle studies that, to date, have struggled to quantify the effects of agricultural management practices such as irrigation. On the basis of the results presented here, it is expected that better representation of managed lands will lead to improved weather and climate forecasting skill when the new irrigation scheme is incorporated into NWP models such as NOAA's Global Forecast System (GFS).