GCRI · Established platform

Water Nexus

Q: Where are findings published?

Reviewed outputs appear on the publications page , and contributions to the Nexus Reports series are listed on Publish in Nexus Reports.

Q: How do I report an error?

Use corrections and concerns , or write to integrity@therisk.global . A correction is recorded as a new version, never a silent edit.

The interdependence of water services, watersheds, human health, energy, food and economic resilience. Water Nexus is an established platform published by The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation.

Open Mandate and publisher About GCRI

On the map below

Precipitation: NASA GPM IMERG12 Oct 2026
Soil moisture: NASA SMAP Level 411 Oct 2026
Flood water: NASA VIIRS flood product14 Oct 2026
River flow: 53 river stations, GloFASsnapshot 14 Oct 2026

The interactive map needs JavaScript; the station table under the map lists every river value.

Layers 4

Rivers

Precipitation

Floods

Drought and soil moisture

Snow and ice

Groundwater and storage

Oceans and context

3D columns: nexus exposure per hexagon

Latest available

NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · GloFAS via Open-Meteo · Natural Earth

Loading the latest NASA imagery.

3D: drag to move, right-drag or Shift and drag to turn and tilt, two fingers to pinch, turn and tilt; 2D: drag to move. Ctrl or ⌘ and scroll, pinch or the buttons to zoom; hover for the values under the pointer; select a river station to pin its 37-day discharge. Relief in 3D is ASTER GDEM elevation, exaggerated so it reads at world scale.

Today's water picture across the world: rain, flood water, soil moisture, snow and ice, water storage and ocean warmth from NASA satellites and models, draped on the terrain, with river flow at 53 great rivers against the usual for the month.Each layer is a NASA or Copernicus product shown as published, with its own date; satellite and model values, not ground measurements and not a flood warning; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.

Data: NASA GIBS · ASTER GDEM · Copernicus GloFAS · Open-Meteo · Natural EarthSources and licences

We acknowledge the use of imagery provided by services from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS). Colours redrawn from the published colour map; values averaged into H3 cells where shown (modified). NASA open data
GPM IMERG precipitation, NASA Precipitation Processing System; distributed by the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC); imagery via NASA GIBS. Colours redrawn from the published colour map; values averaged into H3 cells where shown (modified). NASA open data
VIIRS near-real-time products (flood, land surface temperature, snow cover, corrected reflectance), NASA LANCE; imagery via NASA GIBS. Colours redrawn from the published colour map; values averaged into H3 cells where shown (modified). NASA open data
SMAP Level 4 soil moisture and snow mass, NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office; distributed by the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center DAAC; imagery via NASA GIBS. Colours redrawn from the published colour map; values averaged into H3 cells where shown (modified). NASA open data
GHRSST Level 4 MUR analyses, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; distributed by the NASA Physical Oceanography DAAC (PO.DAAC); imagery via NASA GIBS. Colours redrawn from the published colour map; values averaged into H3 cells where shown (modified). NASA open data
GLDAS Noah land surface model, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; distributed by the NASA GES DISC; imagery via NASA GIBS. Colours redrawn from the published colour map; values averaged into H3 cells where shown (modified). NASA open data
GRACE and GRACE-FO JPL mascon solution, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; distributed by the NASA Physical Oceanography DAAC (PO.DAAC); imagery via NASA GIBS. Colours redrawn from the published colour map; values averaged into H3 cells where shown (modified). NASA open data
Blue Marble, NASA Earth Observatory; imagery via NASA GIBS. Colours redrawn from the published colour map; values averaged into H3 cells where shown (modified). NASA open data
Kuzma, S., et al. 2023. Aqueduct 4.0: Updated decision-relevant global water risk indicators. World Resources Institute. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. CC BY 4.0
ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA (ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model V003, NASA LP DAAC); imagery via NASA GIBS. Colours redrawn from the published colour map; values averaged into H3 cells where shown (modified). NASA open data
Made with Natural Earth. Free vector and raster map data @ naturalearthdata.com. Public domain
Contains modified Copernicus Emergency Management Service information 2026. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use of this information. Discharge compared with a computed monthly normal (modified). CEMS-FLOODS licence
Weather and flood data by Open-Meteo.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Discharge compared with a computed monthly normal (modified). CC BY 4.0
River discharge: Copernicus GloFAS via Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0); normal: median daily discharge for the calendar month, 2018 to 2024 (8th to 21st of each month), Copernicus GloFAS via Open-Meteo.
Hexagon cells: Uber H3 (h3-js, Apache-2.0), computed at build time.

Layers and dates

Precipitation rate, daily mean: GPM IMERG, NASA GES DISC · 12 Oct 2026
Precipitation rate, latest half hour: GPM IMERG, NASA GES DISC · 14 Oct 2026, 00:30 UTC
Flood water, 3-day composite: VIIRS Global Flood Product, NASA LANCE · 14 Oct 2026
Root-zone soil moisture, 0 to 100 cm: SMAP Level 4, NASA NSIDC DAAC · 11 Oct 2026
Surface soil moisture, 0 to 5 cm: SMAP Level 4, NASA NSIDC DAAC · 11 Oct 2026
Land surface temperature, day: VIIRS NOAA-20, NASA LANCE · 13 Oct 2026
Snow cover: VIIRS NOAA-20 NDSI, NASA LANCE · 13 Oct 2026
Snow mass (water in the snowpack): SMAP Level 4, NASA NSIDC DAAC · 11 Oct 2026
Sea ice concentration: GHRSST MUR, NASA JPL PO.DAAC · 12 Oct 2026
Underground soil moisture, monthly: GLDAS Noah, NASA GES DISC · May 2026
Water storage anomaly, monthly: GRACE-FO JPL mascons, NASA JPL PO.DAAC · July 2022
Sea surface temperature anomaly: GHRSST MUR25, NASA JPL PO.DAAC · 12 Oct 2026
True colour: VIIRS NOAA-20 corrected reflectance, NASA LANCE · 13 Oct 2026
Blue Marble relief and bathymetry: Blue Marble, NASA Earth Observatory · static
Baseline water stress (1979-2019 baseline): Water risk: WRI Aqueduct 4.0 (2023), World Resources Institute, CC BY 4.0; summarised to hexagons by GCRI · 5 Jul 2023

All 53 river stations, values and units (snapshot 14 Oct 2026)

Country	Discharge, m³/s	Against normal	Rain 30 days, mm	Soil moisture, m³/m³
BR	63,973	0.8 ×	4	0.136
CD	19,230	0.71 ×	49	0.266
EG	11,219	0.57 ×	0	0.135
SD	8,850	0.51 ×	0	0.109
NE	3,916	0.54 ×	86	0.074
NG	9,771	0.53 ×	228	0.155
MZ	1,857	1 ×	33	0.253
ZA	1,068	14.43 ×	77	0.126
BW	173	0.89 ×	4	0.052
SN	742	0.49 ×	128	0.222
GH	3,775	0.52 ×	184	0.274
MZ	171	15.55 ×	94	0.266
US	14,722	1.22 ×	3	0.188
US	1,577	1.25 ×	19	0.119
US	312	1.12 ×	35	0.197
US	2,857	0.96 ×	5	0.036
US	451	1.12 ×	0	0.086
CA	6,838	0.95 ×	67	0.345
CA	3,033	1.16 ×	98	0.243
CA	9,015	1.01 ×	36	0.263
US	10,398	1.21 ×	75	0.334
US	108	2.12 ×	47	0.253
VE	23,822	0.81 ×	74	0.259
CO	12,941	0.81 ×	174	0.446
AR	21,527	1.96 ×	142	0.266
UY	14,354	2.65 ×	91	0.176
BR	1,492	1.11 ×	1	0.185
NL	917	0.58 ×	34	0.253
RO	1,958	0.44 ×	19	0.272
FR	978	0.83 ×	45	0.233
DE	121	0.28 ×	69	0.153
IT	886	0.8 ×	15	0.268
RU	7,046	1.04 ×	22	0.151
RU	9,375	0.92 ×	26	0.287
RU	10,350	0.61 ×	68	0.322
RU	14,288	0.75 ×	77	0.334
RU	10,714	0.95 ×	25	0.129
IQ	216	1.05 ×	0	0.145
IQ	433	1.13 ×	1	0.151
TM	692	1.15 ×	1	0.109
PK	3,118	0.86 ×	2	0.114
IN	26,606	1.21 ×	146	0.337
BD	12,245	0.54 ×	89	0.373
IN	8.1	0.35 ×	301	0.321
MM	14,858	0.81 ×	192	0.295
KH	18,922	0.68 ×	273	0.377
TH	2,779	0.94 ×	393	0.253
VN	999	0.38 ×	225	0.232
CN	26,729	0.92 ×	67	0.214
CN	3,154	0.95 ×	39	0.278
CN	2,672	0.7 ×	66	0.27
AU	213	0.53 ×	22	0.128
AU	9.62	0.51 ×	18	0.106

01In brief

Water Nexus in brief.

Water security is a population's capacity to keep reliable access to enough water of acceptable quality, and to be protected from water-related disasters and pollution, in the working definition UN-Water uses. Water Nexus covers the parts of that system where risk concentrates: extremes, catchments, aquifers, shared basins, utilities, sanitation and the links to energy, food and ecosystems. Each topic page names its indicators, public data, methods and the authorities that decide.

Who it serves

Its community

Basin scientists; water utilities; municipal engineers; water agencies; WASH researchers.

How it works

Its methods

Hydrologic modelling; groundwater and water-quality monitoring; catchment GIS; scenario uncertainty.

What it produces

Its outputs

Watershed research briefs; public-safe basin maps; utility resilience case studies.

02Key terms

Terms used on this page.

Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.

Term	Definition
Water security	A population's capacity to keep reliable access to enough water of acceptable quality for health, livelihoods and production, and to be protected from water-related disasters and pollution.
Water stress	Freshwater withdrawn by all sectors as a share of the renewable freshwater available once environmental flow requirements are met; SDG indicator 6.4.2 measures it.
Integrated water resources management	A process that coordinates the development and management of water, land and related resources across sectors and levels of government; SDG indicator 6.5.1 tracks how far it is implemented.
Environmental flows	The quantity, timing and quality of freshwater flows needed to sustain river, wetland and estuarine ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on them.
Return period	The average interval between events of a given size, equal to the inverse of the annual exceedance probability; a one-in-a-hundred-year flood has a one in a hundred chance of being exceeded in any year.
Transboundary basin	A river, lake or aquifer basin shared by two or more countries, where use upstream changes the water, sediment and risk that arrive downstream.

03Console

Basin stress monitor, in outline.

The working screen behind this platform: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.

Basin stress monitor: the screen's structure, terms and states for Basin A.Placeholder names and illustrative values; a design, not a record or a live system.

04Topics

Households without safe supply or sanitation, and communities on floodplains, bear the first and largest consequences.

Precipitation becomes soil moisture, runoff, river flow and groundwater recharge through processes that hydrologists can describe but not fully observe. Every user downstream inherits the decisions and the uncertainty upstream. When a drought lowers reservoirs and aquifers, it reduces drinking water reserves, constrains the cooling water thermal power stations need, cuts hydropower output, stresses irrigated agriculture and degrades the wetlands that buffer floods and filter pollution.

Floods cascade in the other direction. Intense rainfall overwhelms drainage, inundates treatment works and pumping stations, mobilises contaminants and interrupts electricity, which in turn stops pumps and treatment. Waterborne disease follows when sanitation fails. Because these systems are tightly coupled and designed against a historical climate that is changing, failures can propagate faster than the institutions responsible for each part can coordinate.

The science problem is therefore not only how much water there is, but how stress moves through the services, economies and ecosystems that depend on it, and how confident anyone can be about it.

07What the platform does

Evidence for the people who run and govern water systems.

Water Nexus produces research that a utility engineer, a basin scientist and a public official can each use and check. Its methods are hydrologic modelling, groundwater and water-quality monitoring, catchment geographic information systems (GIS) and scenario analysis with stated uncertainty.

Audience

Who it serves

Basin scientists, water utilities, municipal engineers, water agencies and WASH researchers, with the universities and field teams that support them.

Methods

How it works

Water balance and hydrologic models, monitoring networks, remote sensing, spatial analysis and uncertainty quantification, each documented with its limits.

Outputs

What it is designed to publish

Watershed research briefs, public-safe basin maps and utility resilience case studies, released through reviewed publication.

Water Nexus does science. It does not regulate water services, allocate water rights, certify utilities or approve projects; its findings carry their methods and uncertainty.

08Foundations and counterparts

Grounded in STEM, connected across the Consortium.

Water Nexus is the steward platform for two nodes of the STEM Commons: hydrology and water science and water and environmental engineering. It also applies Earth observation, geospatial information systems, sensors and observation networks, forecasting and time-series analysis, extreme value analysis, spatial statistics and uncertainty quantification; see the STEM foundation of Water Nexus.

Each institution keeps its own mandate: GCRI does the science, GRF governs and convenes, GRA builds shared financial-sector understanding. The full list is on counterparts across the Consortium, and the field gateway is Water.

09Grounding

Built on named science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Every claim on Water Nexus rests on methods with a canonical page in the STEM Commons, so readers can see what a finding depends on and where its limits lie.

Hydrology and water scienceWater and environmental engineeringGeospatial information systemsEarth observation and remote sensingSensors, IoT and observation networksForecasting and time-series analysisExtreme value theory and tail riskSpatial statistics and geostatisticsUncertainty quantification and model validation

See the STEM foundation of Water Nexus

10Cycle

How work moves in this field.

A question becomes evidence, a governed build, an organized community, a controlled test, a reviewed publication and, finally, a decision taken by the competent authority under its own rules.

QuestionNational, regional or institutional priorityQuestion in Water Nexus
EvidenceSTEM foundation of the platformEvidence in Water Nexus
BuildNexus FoundryBuild in Water Nexus
OrganizeNexus EcosystemOrganize in Water Nexus
TestNexus Universe (independent site)Test in Water Nexus
PublishNexus ReportsPublish in Water Nexus
DecideCompetent authorities and institutions, through Nexus RailsDecide in Water Nexus
RenewCorrections and the next annual agendaRenew in Water Nexus

11Canvas

The Nexus cycle on this platform.

Canvas · the Nexus cycle on this platformDesign, not a record

Fig.The Nexus cycle on this platform, from question to renewal. Design, not a record of a run.

12Frameworks

What the work is read against.

The platform does not set standards. It reads its evidence against the frameworks that competent bodies have adopted, so a finding can be placed where a decision-maker already works.

Framework or standard	Body	What it sets
Sustainable Development Goal 6 and its indicators	United Nations	Targets and indicator definitions for drinking water, sanitation, water quality, efficiency, scarcity and integrated management
WHO Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality	World Health Organization	Health-based targets, water safety plans and surveillance for drinking-water supplies
Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction	UNDRR	Priorities and targets for understanding, governing, investing in and preparing for disaster risk, floods and droughts included
UN Watercourses Convention and the UNECE Water Convention	United Nations, UNECE	Principles of equitable and reasonable use, no significant harm and cooperation on shared watercourses
WMO Guidelines on hydrological and drought monitoring	World Meteorological Organization	Standard practice for gauging, indices such as the standardised precipitation index, and early warning
ISO 24510 to 24512	International Organization for Standardization	Service assessment and management of drinking-water and wastewater utilities
Integrated Water Resources Management	Global Water Partnership, UN-Water	Coordinated development of water, land and related resources across sectors and levels
Paris Agreement adaptation reporting	UNFCCC	National adaptation plans and reporting in which water risks are a central component

13Consortium

The same field, seen three ways.

GCRI studies a field as science, GRF governs it and GRA builds shared financial understanding of it. Water Nexus links to its counterparts so that work on one side is visible on the others.

15Connected

Where this page leads across the Consortium.

16Questions

Questions and answers.

Who publishes Water Nexus?

The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI) publishes Water Nexus and is responsible for what it publishes. GCRI is a research, development and policy institution. It is not a regulator, and it does not certify, license or approve; its findings carry their methods and uncertainty.

Is Water Nexus active?

Water Nexus is an established platform published by The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation. The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.

How can I contribute?

Start with the participation paths or write to contact@therisk.global. An enquiry receives a reference; it does not create membership, a role or an assignment.

Where are findings published?

Reviewed outputs appear on the publications page, and contributions to the Nexus Reports series are listed on Publish in Nexus Reports.

Which values on this platform are real?

Indicator names, units, sources, methods and frameworks are real. Levels in figures and canvases are placeholders in a design. A programme replaces them with labelled evidence it owns.

How do I report an error?

Use corrections and concerns, or write to integrity@therisk.global. A correction is recorded as a new version, never a silent edit.

Is Water Nexus a water regulator or utility?

No. It studies water systems and publishes evidence with its methods and uncertainty. Water allocation, service standards and licensing remain with the competent public authorities and operators.

Can a utility share operational data?

A utility can discuss a data contribution by writing to research@therisk.global. Terms, confidentiality and permitted uses are agreed in writing before any data is received, and security-sensitive asset detail is never published.

Around Water Nexus.

Water Nexus

Bring your expertise to this field.

The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.

Write to the team See all contact routes

Shopping Cart

Water Nexus

Water Nexus in brief.

Its community

Its methods

Its outputs

Terms used on this page.

Basin stress monitor, in outline.

The questions this field works on.

Catchment hydrology

Groundwater and aquifers

Drought and flood

Drinking water and sanitation

Water utilities

Shared river basins

Water-energy interdependence

Water, food and ecosystem links

The areas of water this platform takes on.

Hydrological extremes

Catchments and basins

Groundwater and aquifers

Shared river basins

Utilities and treatment

Drinking water and sanitation

Water, energy and food

Water science and methods

Water failures rarely stay inside the water sector.

One hydrological system

Shared dependencies

Unequal exposure

Evidence for the people who run and govern water systems.

Who it serves

How it works

What it is designed to publish

Grounded in STEM, connected across the Consortium.

Built on named science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

How work moves in this field.

The Nexus cycle on this platform.

What the work is read against.

The same field, seen three ways.

Pages in Water Nexus.

Mandate and publisher

Field overview

Research and evidence

Innovation and practical technology

Programmes and projects

Data and technical methods

Specialist community

Learning and professional development

Events and technical dialogues

Research and publications

Participation paths

Contact the specialist team

Trust, rights and status

STEM foundation of Water Nexus

How work moves in this field

Build in Nexus Foundry

Test in Nexus Universe

Publish in Nexus Reports

The same field across the Consortium

Topics

Where this page leads across the Consortium.

Questions and answers.

Around Water Nexus.

Bring your expertise to this field.