Modeling accumulated surface runoff and water availability for aquifer storage and recovery in the MENA region from 1984-2015

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is the most water-scarce region with only two percent of the global average annual rainfall, hence underground aquifers are the major source of water. The need to improve water productivity and increase aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) is driving the efforts for this acceleration of aquifer storage and recovery project. The objective was to model runoff in the study area using multi-source satellite data and identify regions of runoff retention and recharge. Daily runoff is simulated using a saturation excess principle with the VegET model (Senay 2008). It is a spatially explicit (500m grid cell), one-dimensional root-zone water balance model that is driven by precipitation, operating on a control volume defined by the root zone (1 m deep) using soil water holding capacity (WHC) to define the size of the ?bucket?, and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is used to parameterize daily actual Evapotranspiration (ETa) rates. The datasets included in this Data Release are: daily, and annual precipitation, daily NDVI, daily reference evapotranspiration, daily, monthly, and annual surface runoff, annual actual evapotranspiration, average annual accumulated runoff including the corresponding coefficient of variance, the VegET model Python scripts, and auxiliary data such as vector watershed file and elevation. For detailed description of each dataset please see the individual meta data files.