 And also we have Tony from NGA in this room. So any questions you want to ask about NGA and we're too afraid to ask before, you can ask now. Not that he will answer everything, but. So, okay, so let me get started on the first question because we want to break at 2.15 and have a little break. In the areas, this is changes in water management strategies over time. In the areas of severe groundwater depletion, what steps may be taken to manage groundwater, including recharge? So this is Kamini Singh of School of Minds. I don't think this is an answer to this question, but I think that I'm gonna share it anyway, which is the idea that we have parts of, like parts of the way that we function right now are important to have as water stores in cases of severe depletion. So I think the fact that we like water our lawns in the Western United States, for instance, isn't a bad thing because that provides a store of water when things get really, really terrible. So I think this idea of patterns of human behavior that already exist maybe are less terrible than we think when we think about severe groundwater depletion and potentially using those as stores in the future. Any other comments? I understand what you're getting at. Yeah, I guess maybe I should be more clear because I think if we were better at water conservation, we would use that water for something else. I guess this may be what I... Yeah, so just to follow up on what Kamini was saying, I think it's like the story with irrigation that we've increased irrigation efficiency a lot over years, but we've actually just been increasing crop yields then. We're still using a lot of water for irrigation. It's not like then we've had all of that water left over. So I think the issue of demand hardening, that's like a really good one to bring up of like, maybe it is good that we have some inefficiencies in the slop in our systems that when we're really in trouble, we can let our lawns die. So, sorry, I just stepped in. So apologize if you said this already, but changing the types of crops that are grown, right? I mean, that's one of the obvious steps and it's not always easy. I mean, people have their preferences and there's also considerations of what's... Farmers are gonna think about probably first off, what crop can I get the most value for? But in situations where there's a limited amount of water, then probably not a great place to grow rice or something like that. You think about less water-intensive crops. So... Venkat. I'm looking at the questions here once again. Okay. I mean, the bottom line is you just reduce pumping. That's what we've got to do. And you can do that and still be economically viable. I mean, there's an example of this and I keep having to draw upon the Kansas experience because I think it's educational for guys like you. And Sheridan-6 local enhanced management area is a 256 square kilometer area in northwestern Kansas where they have reduced over the last six to seven years on average the water used by about correcting for climatic conditions about 29%. And they're still making just as much money because they're shifting crop types. They're using water when the plants need it because they're adopting strategies of precision agriculture. They're looking at the soil and moisture, et cetera. So there's a lot can be done in terms of that aspect that we need to focus on. So can I say over here, improve irrigation efficiency? No, our experience with improving irrigation efficiency is, you know, it's like the natural resource economists have known since like the 1850s with Jevons paradox. Doing that often time actually leads to increase in water use, but in Kansas we have a cap because of the water, right? So we can't increase the use, but folks find use for that to either start growing more water thirsty crops or they irrigate larger land areas. So change the crop to match the biome? Yeah, I mean, you've got to challenge folks. I mean, you got to take them out of the comfort zone. This is not agriculture painted by the numbers, but the irrigation community, it can be highly adaptable and they just need to understand the long-term ramifications of current behavior. Okay, okay. Tony, please. Yeah, this isn't my personal examples, just one I've seen at AGU example of an economic co-op to share water rights for different crop types, high value crops versus more staple crops in Latin America somewhere. But they basically set up an economic system where they would transfer water rights from the low value crops to the high value crops in those dry years. And so setting up those economic exchanges, but that comes with some type of a local agreement to do that to be successful. Kay, can I say, there is another thing that talking with the people of the War Bank is like making sure that the land, they are not effectively irrigated, they're not productive for proportionate to the irrigation amount. They maybe get, so maybe limit or reduce maybe the portion of farm area to only the efficient one or reduce the inefficient portion. Yeah, I think along the lines of the last two comments or that it's more than educating people on unsustainable behavior, because I think most people in the high plains know that we have groundwater declines, that we don't always have the right economic policies in place that actually incentivize people to do what's in their best long-term interest or we might be incentivizing crop choices and cropping patterns that are the opposite of what we actually want. So I think it's partially better monitoring so people can see the Kansas example is great because they're actually really keeping track of it and they can see when they've had success. And then, so it's like two things. So people can see that there's a problem and see when they have success, but then there's also economic policies in place that at least don't incentivize them to do the opposite. How about reuse? So for example, recycle waste water for artificial groundwater recharge, for example. Yeah, I think it's a three hours, right? Reduce, reuse, and recycle, so yeah, so. Another thing here, which is looking to success stories, so the obvious example I think is Israel where they do amazing amount with a very little amount of water, so replicating the practices that they have and the policies is definitely the smart way to go. I was gonna add to recharge, just coming up with intelligent ways to recharge. So like online canals, I think people may have mentioned earlier, but that's one of the most efficient ways to recharge really large areas, but then also finding areas that have high enough permeability and connections to the aquifers that we're trying to recharge so we know that the water is actually going where we want it to go. The other thing I was gonna give, this has come up before in some of the other discussions, but obviously we can't manage what we can't measure, right, and so when Jim is talking about every pump in Kansas having a meter on it, I think part of being able to manage groundwater is actually knowing what people are using, so that idea of metering more broadly our use seems like a worthwhile step. Better monitoring. Better monitoring. Better monitoring, yeah. Okay, let's jump to number two. We can circle back if we need in the end. What remote sensing technologies and modeling capabilities can be used to identify and track water management approaches being used? INSAR is used for this, right? People used INSAR for this for a while, right? Brian? Yes, so INSAR is always tricky because it's giving us mostly what's happening in the confined aquifer, so like in the high plains aquifer, it's INSAR INSAR. In the high plains aquifer, they're pumping tons of groundwater, but there's almost no subside in the signal, so it really depends on the area, but it's definitely something that can be used and is used often. Yeah, maybe good clarification, say INSAR and confined aquifers, maybe. I was also going to mention soil moisture, so if you have an area where they are not overeargeting their crops, you'll see that soil moisture decline during the growing season. In our session yesterday, someone was mentioning is that when you have a strategy to manage a groundwater problem, people usually advertise it quite well, so we do know it, we do know about it, but what can become interesting is actually monitoring whether that's working or not, because I think there's a lot of management strategies that have backfired in many ways or that we're not able of making it stop, especially for the large cities. We knew about depletion a long time and that kept on growing, so I think that might be a good way. And irrigation efficiency that has been heavily documented for, I think, 20 years with really, really detailed numbers that it doesn't work and people are still talking about it as a solution. Explain to me again how irrigation efficiency does not work, what happens? It's the behavior of humans, so you save up more water, so you're going to use it to extend your field. So that's why Kansas has imposed caps on these rules and that's a beautiful example that is quite well documented. The FAO has also an extended report that documents all of the strategies that were implemented, case studies of irrigation efficiency strategies implementing, and they try to review that in a neutral way. I really encourage you to read the report. I think the language is very interesting. There's no good examples. So that's a bit of the limit of using the Israel model. I think there's a lot more to learn from it and people tend to read it at a very superficial level. Same thing with the Netherlands initiatives. Yes, it could work in Israel because there's not too much place to extend their agriculture, but in Kansas it can't because they can go forever. So I guess, I mean, the land area. Well, it can also. And more efficient techniques have to be coupled with policies like limiting the amount of water that's being used. And they're growing high dollar produce that they then fly off to the markets all over the world. They got the proximity to international airport. That really helps. Netherlands is the same thing that they can grow this stuff. When you're more aerally broader, it becomes more of a challenge to use some of those techniques. Any other contribution to number two? Okay. So now we come to the two last questions and Tony can give us a little bit more insight. Thank you, Tony, for coming here. He volunteered. He volunteered. It was very kind of him. It was peer pressured into it. So let me read the question out. So with regard to identifying, interpreting changes in water management strategies, where could NGA resources be leveraged to advance this work? So I'll provide kind of the same background that I was trying to give everybody else in the other breakout sessions. So if you, I know a couple of you were in those. And so this will be a little bit of a repeat. But when we talk about NGA resources, what we're thinking about is really there's kind of three pieces of the pie. Remember, the main part, the main customer that we have is the warfighter and the policymaker. So really looking to inform them. So there's three things that go into being able to inform them. One is just the data. Is there data available? So the question, one question that comes to resources is, is there better data sets that you can recommend or collection or things that you can recommend that we might be able to contribute to in terms of better data? The models or technologies to then use that data would be the next step, right? So can we, are the models sufficient and all you really need is the data? Then we might focus more on the data. But if you're, if you say you might have good data, you might have good models, good sensors, then the next thing would be, how do we take that information and make it easier for the policy makers and the warfighter to use? So those are building the tools. So it's essentially a data model sensor, monitoring capability and then the tools to make that accessible to the end user. Those are the three things that we're really kind of focused on when we're talking about where we might put resources. So if you can kind of think it and frame it from that perspective, where are the gaps that might, you know, we might be able to leverage your expertise for us to identify and move towards? Lorela. I think for policy makers, what's really interesting and with respect to groundwater is the food energy water nexus because there's actually a lot of the time groundwater is the victim of food security or energy security considerations. Typically food security would be privileged over the levels of depletions. You see that in many countries. That's also the reason for insurance scheme, the farm bill policy or these sort of things where to help people out to get food or out of poverty that you have groundwater depletion that was induced. And for energy security, it goes a bit along the same way where you make energy freely available and that depletes greatly your groundwater resources. We see that in Iran, we see that in India, we see that in several countries. So I think that's where it's really interesting to put a focus on the policy side of that aspect. I think in terms of modeling, it's really hard to do because we talked about all of the challenges to aggregate the water data together to make this sort of modeling happening at the correct scale that informs really these policies. But when you switch to the food energy and water nexus, you have to aggregate the same information across the two other dimension too. So it's a big challenge. There's a lot of necessity in terms of data, cyber infrastructure, data integration, data simulation, a whole research agenda here, I think. Any more contribution to? For you guys online, the question was what is the role of NGA in accomplishing that? Really, when it comes to us, our goal is to advise the policy makers. So from it comes to a policy side, we don't make any policy decisions or statements there. Our goal is to provide the best information available to those policy makers. So in essence, what we're trying to do is translate science in a way that's understandable. So our role is essentially that, is taking that science and communicating. So science communications is kind of what we're looking at when it comes to this. So the question was, would NGA be the repository for some type of data like this? I would probably argue against the NGA be the sole repository. We do work with other government agencies and international partners to do data curation stuff, but typically we don't store those for public use. And so what we would have to do is identify some type of partners. So we may partner with somebody where they would store it and we might provide some funds for that, some of that initially, or we might work directly with one other government agency who does that type of work. But we're not necessarily gonna do, we're not gonna provide data openly to the public. That's not gonna happen. And I mentioned from the last kind of summary statement that one of the things that we're not really good at is communicating what data that we do have that we could use to help advance some of these tools for things like these agreements that we have. Because in order for us to share a lot of the information that we do have, we have to come in some type of an agreement to do so. With these agreements, a lot of the reason for that is a lot of these unclassified data sets that we're getting are commercially derived. And a lot of those have licensed use restrictions that typically require us to have government purposes in order to share it. So if we want to share it, we have to show that there's some benefit to NGA. So that's why we get into some of these restrictions and why we don't share so openly. I know this is rough to ask on the very last day, Tony, but so is NGA generally also been a repository of data sort of internally for its own use rather than a generator of data? We do generate data and repository. We do have both of those functions, but when it comes to sharing that data, typically it's with U.S. government partners. That's kind of where the restriction typically is. But you guys are actually collecting data on some of these satellites, not just sort of contracting that out to someone else. So if it's the commercial satellites and stuff, we're not responsible for those. Those we would be purchasing the data. So for example, like the Planet Labs, Digital Globe, we have contracts with them to get that commercial data, but we aren't necessarily hosting that data. Those providers are, but we have access to it. Carly, you had some question from online. Just for Tony, do you know about any behavioral, for example, consumption habits, study or database for the U.S. or global rural and urban areas? So I will first emphasize that as an intelligence community member, we do not look at the United States. So without direct request from another government agency. So to make that clear, we are not looking at the U.S. When it comes to repositories of data, this is part of the reason we have this workshop is to identify some of those data gaps and be able to be able to bring that together because all of this information is gonna be a benefit society, right? Not just NGA, because our customer again is gonna be the warfighter and the policymaker and what we're really interested in is making sure that they have the best available information. In that case, it's gonna be coming and looking at the community itself to provide some of that data. One thing that came to mind for me in terms of identifying and interpreting changes and water management strategies that could be useful is some global study of like, in what regions of the world will this certain method work and what regions will this other method work? Because as you know, there's limits to all these different methods in terms of spatial resolution, in terms of what aquifers they tend to work for. So kind of some fairly comprehensive study looking at where they're likely to work. And of course, you wouldn't know in some cases until going in, but based on the data that are available. Okay, I think we are reaching to the point of 215. So I'll go to the last question and I'll encourage Tony to provide as much input as he can. What are some examples of successful collaboration opportunities and what are the promising partnerships that could help advance our understanding? Tony, do you have any insights how NGA has partnered with other people, especially in the hydrologic and water and groundwater spheres? So I'm not sure how much detail I can go into. I can speak to international partnerships that may not necessarily be related directly to hydrology. We do have work with international agreements for things like the currently the TANIMX project. So that's the global elevation data set that where we do work internationally with partners, we do train international scientists to produce these basically elevation products to our standards. So we have high standards for these products. We work with the German government and that because there it's a German private German company just if you're not familiar with the data sets a private German company that's providing the data but NGA has a use agreement to be able to basically we help process the data and provide private data back to them and then we were able to keep that data and use that for again, US government purposes. The issue again, we're sharing that type of data is that it's licensed, right? So licensed restrictions, but we do have that data. If you're able to join us with a Crata or a Nuri or an ARP then there's a possibility you might be able to get access to this. But in that, when I say that it's still being processed, it's not being complete. So there's, it's definitely very dirty in terms of noise in that currently. Any other inputs, please? I have questions, but not for the last one. Sure, please. I was wondering if anyone knew of groundwater management strategy to fight depletion but looking at land use so not increase aquifer recharge interact. So green infrastructure in cities happen. But I was wondering if you knew of, you know multi-crops or fighting deforestation or any sort of actions like this that would fight, that would try to mitigate or increase recharge that way. You know, one of the, one of the most widely used land surface model is SWAT. Not SWAT, but SWAT. And they look at different land use. It's the jack of all trades. The USDA collaboration produced model. I do not know how much they do for recharge estimate. I know it's not coupled to a groundwater model. Jim, correct me if I'm wrong, if you know this. SWAT, soil water assessment too. But I guess you could do it and see how the recharge improves when you change the crop type or, you know, change it back to forest cover. I mean, it's supposed to be working on HRUs, huh? Yeah, but not a entire groundwater aquifer. Can I ask another question then? So we talked about groundwater quantity, but we didn't talk about groundwater quality. And I think depletion in many occurrence, I mean, the typically the case of arsenic in Bangladesh is that depletion led to more arsenic. Does anyone know of strategies that were implemented to fight that issue? So coupled effect of quantity, quantity depletion and impact on quality. So you mean specifically using, like, manipulating groundwater flows to improve water quality versus, like, in situ treatment or something like that? Is that what you're asking about? Oh, it was just to fill the gap that we didn't speak about quality aspect. Oh, I see. So I was wondering if you wanted to contribute on that part because we had quite a few talks about Bangladesh, for instance. There could be any other issues. I guess if I better phrase your question, how does the land, the water management strategies help to improve water quality? Okay, I don't know the answer to it. Well, and I think another example would be, like, salinity in the Central Valley, where our irrigation choices, whether we're doing, like, drip irrigation or flood irrigation can influence a lot how salinity is building up in the soil and the potential for that salinity to flush deeper and contaminate groundwater. So that's the example that comes to my mind in terms of, like, your crop choice and land cover choices and how that can affect quality. And then, of course, like, fertilizer applications and stuff like that. And there are many instances where they inject near the coast to keep out seawater intrusion. That's a fairly popular management strategy. And as far as, you know, other types of heavy metal type contamination possibilities, you don't have to go very far to see them. In much of the Piedmont, you have, I mean, in many cases, you have problems with hexavalent chromium contamination, which, again, is very similar to arsenic. It's related to how oxic the conditions are under the ground. And any type of groundwater depletion will make the conditions more oxic and, you know, allow hexavalent chromium to start migrating. So it's a fairly widespread problem. And only when it gets to very hotspot-type conditions does it receive the kind of attention that, you know, merits some kind of mitigation treatment of that type of operation. I think we should take our break and come back in 15 minutes. Refreshed.