sustainability Article Appraisal of Remote Sensing Technology for Groundwater Resource Management Perspective in Indus Basin Gulraiz Akhter 1,2, *, Yonggang Ge 3,4, * , Naveed Iqbal 5 , Yanjun Shang 6,7,8 and Muhammad Hasan 6,7,8   Citation: Akhter, G.; Ge, Y.; Iqbal, N.; Shang, Y.; Hasan, M. Appraisal of Remote Sensing Technology for Groundwater Resource Management Perspective in Indus Basin. Sustainability 2021, 13, 9686. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13179686 Academic Editor: Chunjiang An Received: 18 July 2021 Accepted: 25 August 2021 Published: 28 August 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 China-Pakistan Joint Research Center on Earth Sciences, CAS-HEC, Islamabad 45320, Pakistan 2 Department of Earth Sciences, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad 45320, Pakistan 3 Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu 610041, China 4 Key Laboratory of Mountain Hazards and Earth Surface Processes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu 610041, China 5 Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources, Islamabad 44790, Pakistan; naveed_spacian@yahoo.com 6 Key Laboratory of Shale Gas and Geoengineering, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China; jun94@mail.iggcas.ac.cn (Y.S.); hasan.mjiinnww@gmail.com (M.H.) 7 Institutions of Earth Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China 8 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China * Correspondence: agulraiz@qau.edu.pk (G.A.); gyg@imde.ac.cn (Y.G.) Abstract: The dynamic nature and unsustainable exploitation of groundwater aquifers pose a range of management challenges. The accurate basin-wide hydrological assessment is very critical for the quantification of abstraction rates, spatial patterns of groundwater usage, recharge and discharge processes, and identification of critical areas having groundwater mining. This study provides the appraisal of remote sensing technology in comparison with traditionally prevailing tools and methodologies and introduces the practical use of remote sensing technology to bridge the data gaps. It demonstrates the example of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite inferred Total Water Storage (TWS) information to quantify the behavior of the Upper Indus Plain Aquifer. The spatio-temporal changes in aquifer usage are investigated particularly for irrigation and anthropogenic purposes in general. The GRACE satellite is effective in capturing the water balance components. The basin-wide monthly scale groundwater storage monitoring is a big opportunity for groundwater managers and policymakers. The remote sensing integrated algorithms are useful tools to provide timely and valuable information on aquifer behavior. Such tools are potentially helpful to support the implementation of groundwater management strategies, especially in the developing world where data scarcity is a major challenge. Groundwater resources have not grown to meet the growing demands of the population, consequently, overexploitation of groundwater resources has occurred in these decades, leading to groundwater decline. However, future developments in the field of space technology are envisioned to overcome the currently faced spatio-temporal challenges. Keywords: groundwater; remote sensing; Indus Basin; Pakistan; GRACE 1. Introduction Groundwater is an underground finite resource contributing to agricultural mainte- nance and ecosystem sustainability. It acts as a buffer in droughts and helps in maintaining the water supplies in countries like Pakistan where surface water is more prone to cli- matic implications in addition to storage limitations. In Pakistan, groundwater fulfills approximately 90% of drinking water requirements and more than 60% of irrigation water supplies [1]. The Indus Basin is the largest basin in Pakistan [2] and serves as the main source of groundwater. More than one million tube wells are pumping fresh groundwater in the Upper Indus Plain—Punjab Province [3]. As a result, the water table is depleting and the water quality deteriorating [4,5]. In recent years, groundwater availability for irrigation has dropped from 5000 m 3 per capita to less than 1000 m 3 [6] due to population growth and agricultural land expansion. Sustainability 2021, 13, 9686. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13179686 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability