China turns down India's proposal for joint mechanism on Brahmaputra - The New Indian Express

I feel a connection to the Brahmaputra River. In 1995, my husband and I visited Assam and even took a rafting trip on one of the Brahmputra's tributaries.  In 1998, I had the privilege of going to Tibet, where I traveled along the Yarlung Tsangpo River, as the river is known in its upper reaches.  Water issues concerning the river basin have since been of interest to me.

As I wrote in a previous post, Brahma Chellaney dedicated a whole chapter on the Tibetan Plateau in his book  Water: Asia's New Battleground.  He also discussed China's unwillingness to participate in transnational water commissions or international agreements.  It should come as no surprise then that China turns down India's proposal for joint mechanism on Brahmaputra.

The Ganges Brahmaputra River Basin area was created from the data set Hydrological basins in Southeast Asia.

The majority of the linework of the map was obtained by delineating drainage basin boundaries from hydrologically corrected elevation data with a resolution of 15 arc-seconds. The elevation dataset was part of a mapping product, HydroSHEDS, developed by the Conservation Science Program of World Wildlife Fund. Original input data had been obtained during NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). Areas north of the SRTM extent, 60 degrees N, were obtained by merging with the HYDRO1k basin layer.

You may download a JPEG, PDF, or ArcMap document of the Ganges Brahmaputra River Basin.

Map of projected population in #India 2015

Here is a map that I created that shows projected population in India in 2015.  The data comes from the Population Count Grid, Future Estimates of the Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3). Future Estimates consists of estimates of human population for the years 2005, 2010, and 2015 by 2.5 arc-minute grid cells and associated data sets dated circa 2000. For more information, view the metadata.

As with my other maps, I created this map using Esri ArcMap 10. Each 2.5-min cell contains a value of the estimated population for that area in 2015.   I have overlayed the population layer on top of the Ganges-Brahmaputra River Basin layer.

Unfortunately, I was not able to create a legend for this map. I have shared an ArcMap document (.mxd), a PDF file, and JPEG image via Google Drive. By selecting the population layer in the .mxd file and using the identification arrow, you can find out the population for that 2.5-min cell..

Citation:

Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)/Columbia University, United Nations Food and Agriculture Programme (FAO), and Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT). 2005. Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3): Population Count Grid, Future Estimates. Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/gpw-v3-population-count-future-estimates. Accessed 09 April 2013.

Map of West Bengal #India

If you've noticed, I added a TripIt badge to the sidebar, which shows that I'm going to Kolkata (Calcutta) on Thursday.  This inspired me to create a map of West Bengal, complete with inset map showing the location of West Bengal in India:

I used two data layers, one for the map of West Bengal, and the other for the inset map.

You may download a zip file containing the map of West Bengal in JPEG, PDF, and ArcMap (.mxd) formats.

#India: areas under irrigation map

After being unhappy with the maps in Brahma Chellaney’s book Water: Asia's New Battleground, I decided to create my own map of areas under irrigation in India.

For this map, I used irrigation data from the global map of irrigation areas from AQUASTAT, the FAO's global information system on water and agriculture.  Data shows the percentage of irrigated land per 5 arcmin cell, which is approximately 8547 hectares: someone check my calculations!

Source: Stefan Siebert, Petra Döll, Sebastian Feick, Jippe Hoogeveen and Karen Frenken (2007) Global Map of Irrigation Areas version 4.0.1. Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany / Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy

The number of cells in the AQUASTAT data set is huge: 4320 columns x 1260 rows = 5,443,200 cells.  To bring this down to size, I clipped the map to the area of India.  Even so, I had more data than ArcMap could handle (max: 10,000 items) in computing equal percentage intervals (see the map legend).  Nonetheless, the resulting map corresponded well to the Global Map of Irrigated Ares.  The Ganges River basin is the most irrigated area in the world.

You may download the map of irrigated areas in India in JPEG format or the map of irrigated areas of India in PDF format. Alternatively, if you would like to muck around with the map itself, download the ArcMap document showing irrigated areas of India.

Rivers of India with Landsat imagery

Here is another map I created of the rivers of India, this time with Landsat imagery:

You may download the map of the rivers of India in JPEG format or the map of the rivers of India in PDF format. Alternatively, if you would like to play around with the map itself, download the ArcMap document showing the rivers of India.