ABSTRACT
The price of commodities goes up and down, as anyone in the oil and mining industries can attest. Yet water is one commodity that is increasingly in demand just about everywhere. An oil company drilling a well may be able to use brackish or saline water to mix their drilling mud, but fresh potable water is required for communities and agriculture and is not always available. Already we see competition between communities and farmers for scarce water resources. Remote sensing can help locate sources of groundwater, measure the amount and distribution of surface water, and in some cases can infer whether it is fresh or brackish. It is important to be able to monitor surface water for changes in salinity (agriculture), temperature (weather prediction), or turbidity (human consumption), both onshore and in marine settings. Water quality is addressed in Chapter 14, and ooding and erosion in Chapter 16. In this chapter, we look at how remote sensing can be used to locate groundwater, surface water, and measure soil moisture.
