Significance: Jordan is facing an unfolding water crisis, exacerbated by climate change and conflict-induced refugee influxes. We present a freshwater security analysis for the country, enabled by an integrated systems model that combines simulation of Jordan’s natural and built water environment with thousands of representative human agents determining water allocation and use decisions. Our analysis points to severe, potentially destabilizing, declines in Jordan’s freshwater security. Without intervening measures, over 90% of Jordan’s low-income population will be experiencing critical water insecurity by the end of the century. To gain a foothold on its water future, Jordan must enact an ambitious portfolio of interventions that span supply- and demand-side measures, including large-scale desalinization and comprehensive water-sector reform.

In river basins with water storage facilities, the availability of regularly updated information on reservoir level and capacity is of paramount importance for the effective management of those systems. However, for the vast majority of reservoirs around the world, storage levels are either not measured or not readily available due to financial, political, or legal considerations. This paper proposes a novel approach using Landsat imagery and digital elevation models (DEMs) to retrieve information on storage variations in any inaccessible region. Unlike existing approaches, the method does not require any in situ measurement and is appropriate for monitoring small, and often undocumented, irrigation reservoirs. It consists of three recovery steps: (i) a 2-D dynamic classification of Landsat spectral band information to quantify the surface area of water, (ii) a statistical correction of DEM data to characterize the topography of each reservoir, and (iii) a 3-D reconstruction algorithm to correct for clouds and Landsat 7 Scan Line Corrector failure. The method is applied to quantify reservoir storage in the Yarmouk basin in southern Syria, where ground monitoring is impeded by the ongoing civil war. It is validated against available in situ measurements in neighbouring Jordanian reservoirs. Coefficients of determination range from 0.69 to 0.84, and the normalized root-mean-square error from 10 to 16 % for storage estimations on six Jordanian reservoirs with maximal water surface areas ranging from 0.59 to 3.79 km².

Significance: The notion that sudden impacts on shared international waters can be detected and quantified, even in a war zone, is important to scientists and policy makers, who have been stifled in the past by inaccessibility to such regions and the consequent inability to collect relevant data. Our study uses satellite imagery of war-torn Syria, showing how conflict and migration caused sudden reductions in Syrian agricultural land use and water use. An unexpected effect of the conflict was increased flow in the Yarmouk River to Jordan, which nonetheless remains one of the world’s most water-poor nations. The study illustrates that conflict and human displacement can significantly alter a basin’s water balance with dramatic effects on the transboundary partitioning of water resources.

Stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) is one of the few methods available to solve multipurpose-multireservoir operation problems in a stochastic environment. This algorithm requires that the one-stage optimization problem be a convex program so that the efficient Benders decomposition scheme can be implemented to handle the large state-space that characterizes multireservoir operation problems. When working with hydropower systems, one usually assumes that the production of hydroelectricity is dominated by the release term and not by the head (storage) term to circumvent the nonlinearity of the hydropower production function. Although this approximation is satisfactory for high head power stations for which the difference between the maximum and the minimum head is small compared to the maximum head, it may no longer be acceptable when a significant portion of the energy originates from low and/or medium head power plants. Recent developments improve the representation of the nonlinear hydropower fu...