The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) is a Future Harvest Centre supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and is based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It has regional offices in Southern Africa, India, Pakistan, Central Asia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. It is primarily a research organisation charged with improving the use of water in agriculture and safeguarding environmental water use through the promotion of integrated water resources management.
IWMI
has strong interest in the development and use of GIS and Remote Sensing
in water management, in health, ecosystems, irrigation system operation,
river basin modelling and performance assessment of agricultural systems.
IWMI
and the University of East Anglia (UK) have developed a World
Water and Climate Atlas, which spatially interpolates monthly average
climate and rainfall data and computes reference evapo-transpiration at
any point on the globe. The atlas is also available on CD-ROM. Data from
the atlas can be combined with global and local models and is being used
as a mask in a project to map the actual irrigated area of the world,
using remote sensing imagery.
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Remote sensed estimates of evapo-transpiration have been used in basin level modelling exercises in Turkey, Iran, and Sri Lanka. This has been used to determine the efficiency of water use, crop productivity, required environmental flow allocations and to evaluate overall basin scale water balances. GIS has been used extensively in Malaria mapping research in Sri Lanka. IWMI is in the process of developing integrated databases for river basin management and global modelling exercises, which make extensive use of GIS and remote sensing, coupled to other forms of data, including socio-economic, health and poverty indicators.
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