الفهرس 
Overview of Egypt’s aquifersOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Moving towards horizontal expansion in the vast barren lands to alleviate the overpopulation along the Nile River and to achieve food self-sufficiency is the backbone of Egypt’s Vision 2030. Accordingly, a mega groundwater-dependent rural development project was advocated under a national framework aiming to fulfil the growing food demand and restore the country’s status as a major agricultural state. The government ambitiously intends to convert swaths of desert acres into viable agricultural. Through a governmental-funded research project, the contribution of the thesis fundamentally falls on exploring the potential of water and land resources throughout the Moghra desert to define the optimal exploitation policies that promote a sustainable development strategy. A field trip and interviews with farmers, investors and stakeholders were conducted to obtain a real picture of obstacles and to collect required in situ measurements. Aside from being a data-scarce region plagued with a water-sparse and arid climate, management of the Moghra fossil aquifer for the proposed intensive pumping was a key challenge. The previous studies conducted over the last two decades on groundwater management and the uses of such fossil aquifers in Egypt were revisited. The modelling studies were constrained by the unavailability of data, access difficulties, and high costs of collecting such data in desert lands. Most studies aimed to test the aquifer’s behaviour under different pumping rates but with poor definitions of boundary conditions and limited historical data. The data scarcity inhibits the development of a rigorous modelling study and aquifer management decision-making. Hereby, in addition to the extensive field visits, a satellite-based approach was adopted to observe the pumping-induced change in the aquifers’ dynamics and footprint.