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11 Trillion Gallons of Water Needed To End California Drought
mrflash818 points out a new study which found that California can recover from its lengthy drought with a mere 11 trillion gallons of water. The volume this water would occupy (roughly 42 cubic kilometers) is half again as large as the biggest water reservoir in the U.S. A team of JPL scientists worked this out through the use of NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. From the article:
GRACE data reveal that, since 2011, the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins decreased in volume by four trillion gallons of water each year (15 cubic kilometers). That's more water than California's 38 million residents use each year for domestic and municipal purposes. About two-thirds of the loss is due to depletion of groundwater beneath California's Central Valley. ... New drought maps show groundwater levels across the U.S. Southwest are in the lowest two to 10 percent since 1949.
GRACE data reveal that since 2011, farmers raising water-intensive crops in barren desert soil caused the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins to decrease in volume by four trillion gallons of water each year (15 cubic kilometers).
Is that a lot? I mean compared to rainfall over that area.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I wasn't real thrilled with the linked article. All it did was call out a number with nothing to scale it against.
A real quick search brought up an estimate of three years worth of rain like this would be needed to make up for the drought and also had some other ways of relating what 11 trillion gallons actually means as precipitation received is traditionally measured in inches.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wh...
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Excellent, I love a nice warm dessert. You can never have enough pie.
that we not get it all at once please.
My favorite warm dessert is creme brulée. What's yours?
Surely there is a technological fix for this?
If I look outside the window of my little office in Santa Clara, the patch has already been applied. It has been raining all day!
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Transporting water that distance is completely impractical compared to simply desalinating ocean water that's available locally.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Most of California isn't desert, only parts of Southern California. As an example, the Central Valley, the state's biggest agricultural area isn't, nor are the wine growing areas near San Francisco, and yet, they're being hit by the drought just as badly.
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Those wetlands you're disparaging are flood control systems. Those wetlands keep the rain from flowing straight out into the ocean; part of the reason we're in this mess now is that we've spent the last 100 years plowing them into the ground and pouring concrete over them (see: LA river).
What does the EPA have to do with lack of rainfall?
Make something free (or nearly so), and people will use lots of it. CA's water problem is by no means insoluble.
1. Figure out how much water the state can sustainably use.
2. Set a price for water usage. Set a flat price for all users, residential, commercial, industrial. No reason that some users of water should get it more cheaply than others.
3. If usage remains above the level determine in #1, raise the price.
4. Repeat process until usage falls to the level determined in #1.
Of course, this process would likely result in a big chunk of the unsustainable agriculture in CA going under, but so be it - basing a business on the assumption that you'll get continued massive discounts on a key input isn't particularly wise planning, and there's no reason why other CA water users should be forced to subsidize those businesses.
They have been taking water from somewhere for a long time, cant they just take more of someone else' water in order to live in a desert?
Hey, the USA is a large and sparsely populated country.... How about you try living in some of the more habitable areas?
Nobody lives in the California Desert. Well, okay, we do have a decent retirement community out in Palm Springs, but the parts that most people settled on were temperate grasslands, forests, and wetlands (the Central Valley was an inland sea for much of the year before we dammed it all up).
The real problems are:
1) Irresponsible farming by agribusinesses. This one here is the biggie, but is really hard to control because the biggest agribusinesses have so much political clout, both here and in Washington.
2) 150 years of politics. For well over a century, the saying has gone, "Liquor is for drinking; water is for fighting." There are a byzantine set of local, regional, statewide, interstate, and international laws governing how water is used everywhere in the state, most of it based on environmental studies decades or centuries out of date, and none of it changes quickly.
3) Wetland destruction. For a long, long time nobody understood the value of wetlands in water table control, flood prevention, and ecosystem management, and so much of it was filled in and paved over in the last 100 years. This has proven to be a huge mistake, one that will take decades and billions of dollars to fix, and isn't helped by ignorant jackasses who insist that environmental concerns don't exist, that scientists are hucksters, and that God will provide everything we could ever want, forever.
4) Climate change. The theory is nearly 200 years old; the lab-scale proof is over 150 years old; definitive proof it's happening out in the environment is over 50 years old. It's happening, right now, and given politics and the endless prattle of ignorant jackasses it doesn't look like it's going to be slowing down any time soon.
Did you notice what's not on that list? Cities. All of the urban and suburban development in California accounts for less than 10% of the state's annual water usage (the vast, vast majority is used for agriculture), and the number is dropping every year, as more efficiency and water recycling programs come online.
Begun, the water wars have.
Just watch out for the mutant Kangaroos and the hot girl driving the tank.
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They've been doing that for years in my city to brackish water to supplement the water supply. The problem is that these last few years have been exceptionally dry. You can't just build desalination plants overnight, especially for the amount of water we're talking about, plus it needs to be transported quite a distance and is very expensive. Most of the water is used for agriculture. California produces around 1/3 of all of the food in the country.
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Surely there is a technological fix for this?
Stop growing vegetables in an arid valley and replant the massive amount of fallow land in wetter parts of the country.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
It may be raining but there's a long way to go before the drought is truly over. Most importantly you need a good snow pack in the Sierras this winter to end the drought.
There is no drought. There's just overpopulation and pumping water hundreds of miles to farm in a desert. Their #1 electricity use is pumping water for those farms.
Like not enough drinking water for everyone? This not at all what is happening. It's unsustainable agriculture, excessive urban landscaping and lastly, perhaps a need to adjust some social norms. People didn't take daily showers through most of human history.
Did you notice what's not on that list? Cities. All of the urban and suburban development in California accounts for less than 10% of the state's annual water usage (the vast, vast majority is used for agriculture), and the number is dropping every year, as more efficiency and water recycling programs come online.
Sure.. That agricultural usage is completely unrelated to the cities.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Let's exercise how much it might cost to desalinate water
best current tech to desalinate water is about $0.5 per cubic meter
11 trillion gallons ~ 42 cubic km of water or 42 billion cubic meters
thus the sum required is 21 billion dollars.
given that there are reasons to think that cost might be reduced - the solution looks costly but hardly unmanageable
Sure, over-use is a problem, but there's also less precipitation than is normal.
See the scary map here:
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
The weekly update for California says:
Locally heavy precipitation fell across portions of the state this past week. Amounts ranged from 1-6 inches (liquid equivalent) across a large portion of northern California, and parts of the central and southern coastal areas. Up to 3 inches of precipitation (liquid equivalent) was reported in the southern Sierras. However, snow pack remains well below-normal in many areas due to the relatively mild temperatures associated with these storm systems. In addition, much more precipitation is needed to replenish lost reservoir storage. There are still deficits in the conservation pool of millions of acre-feet in the Shasta and Oroville reservoirs north of Sacramento. Oroville reservoir gained about 100,000 acre-feet of storage in the recent storm, returning to one million acre-feet in storage capacity. The capacity of this reservoir is 3.5 million acre-feet, with a flood reserve space of 750,000 acre-feet. Well to the south, last week’s storm produced several inches of rain for San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles Counties. However, this was not enough to generate runoff in natural streams and therefore did not provide any benefit to surface reservoirs. Since the start of the Water Year (October 1), almost all precipitation gauges in the area are still running below normal. No revisions were made to the California drought depiction this week. With the anticipation of another significant precipitation event in the short-term, alterations could be required next week, pending resulting impacts.
New drought maps show groundwater levels across the U.S. Southwest are in the lowest two to 10 percent since 1949.
The remaining bits, in certain areas, will be poisoned by fracking
Suddenly this article makes sense.
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
The Bush family buys 100,000 acres over one of the World's largest fresh water aquifers.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Actually, the main crop that is quite profitable but requires vast amounts of water is not rice, but nuts, specifically Almonds. Rice isn't a problem because the delta around the Sacramento river normally floods, so it doesn't take a ton of effort to rice farm up there. The issue is irrigating both snowmelt and river water to the central valley to grow almonds and other crops.
It flows to the bay not to most of the reservoirs, and not to the Sierras where most of the snowpack provides water for the summer, and not to replenish the ground water (which has been being sucked out for the last century).
You need a hot desert to get the sand. You need sand to get the worms.
Sand trout make the desert. Then they turn into worms. Amateur.
Apply some of that massive Silicon Valley brainpower to developing large-scale desalination instead of the next batch of faddish social media apps.
The US has a number of nuclear-powered naval vessels and a large supply of ice in Alaska. Canada or Russia might provide more. Would something like this work for California?
By my calculation at 47 cents per 100 gallons (which is retail in CA), it would cost about $51 billion to end the drought.
The low end of desalination is $1/cubic meter which would cost about 41 billion while the high end of desalination is about
$2/cubic meter which would cost about 80 billion. I believe those numbers are drinking water too so you could probably
take some shortcuts if all you're doing is filling up a reserve.
40-80 billion is a big number but is fairly managable if depreciated over the life of the desalination plants of say 20 years.
If things get desperate enough, desalination plants are more than capable of providing the water. The main problem
with desalination plants is that they are a risky investment. If the drought ever does end then you are basically
priced out of the market and you have these big expensive desalination plants collecting dust until the next drought.
The area of the state of California is 163,696 square miles.
$ units --verbose
Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2014-04-02
2866 units, 109 prefixes, 79 nonlinear units
You have: 11 trillion gallons
You want: 163696 in mile^2
11 trillion gallons = 3.8666624 * 163696 in mile^2
11 trillion gallons = (1 / 0.25862097) * 163696 in mile^2
I find '4" over the entire state" to be a little bit more manageable than some unscaled number with a bunch of zeros, but maybe it's just me.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
It's less than a dollar a day per person, problem solved. Truth is no one wants to solve the water problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
"Still, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, thermoelectric power generation accounts for only 3.3 percent of net freshwater consumption with over 80 percent going to irrigation."
I'm not sure the use in power is as bad as you assert.
Learn to love Alaska
I just tweeted out your idea to see if we can get it trending.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why do desal? Reuse the water that is coming from the waste water treatment plants. Instead of dumping that in the river to flow out ot sea put it through a second plant and return it to the reservoir. You solve your water problems and you solve the problem of nitrogen rich water flowing into the ocean.
Desals have to combat the corrosion problems you get from dealing with salt. Much easier to deal with non-salt water.
The Fed created some $4 trillion to bail out banks. Off-balance sheet, they created another $16 trillion to bail out foreign banks. We can create money to solve a lot of problems. The artificial scarcity of money is imposed and political, not a necessity.
Technologically the plant designs are almost identical. Both are a reverse osmosis design using pressurised water driven up against a membrane. Modern desal plants are actually quite energy efficient, just not as efficient as AWT plants. And the only reason AWT plants are more efficient is that the input water actually has less impurities than salt water.
The other benefit of AWT plants is you get high nutrient biosolids from it that you can then use as fertiliser. Note this is ONLY the case if the AWT sits down stream from a standard waste water plant. If it doesn't and you do an all in 1 process the solids are contaminated with nasty stuff from the medicines we consume which means it is restricted in its use.
Ghiradeli hasn't been top notch for years. Our weather is most.certainly some of the best in the world. Violent crime rates are virtually identical between Texas and California (https://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank21.html). There hasn't been a power crisis in California for over a decade. An active night life is generally considered a virtue. Breast implant rates in the South are extremely high.
Plus if you want to play the beauty angle, we aren't nearly as fat.
It's great you have regional pride but don't be so condesending if your region can't walk your talk.
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I've looked at the San Francisco annul rainfall for the past 150 years, and this drought was no more severe than the last few in the early 90s and late 70s, among other droughts. The rainfall has averaged 22" a year with a standard deviation of 8". Even if this season doesn't fill the reservoirs, next season will.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
What was exceptional about this drought was the temperature. It had record warmth that dried out the soil more than in the past.
You are probably right, in many ways. As far as I can see, it all comes down to the particular, bone-headed attitude and complete disconnect from reality that somehow seem so iconic of America. If I remember correctly, there was once a saying - 'The rain will follow the plough' - that illustrates it well; I mean, how can anybody even get that idea?
And then there are things like placing a large city in the middle of the Nevada Desert, and the farming, that you mention. You see it so often in The States, it's like everything has to be so perversely over the top. I once stayed in a hotel very near to Oracle's tin-foil silos in Redwood City; the area is what one would describe as semi-arid, I suppose, but Oracle in particular was surrounded by a 10 inch thick lawn, carefully manicured and soaking wet from constant irrigation - it just struck me as blind idiocy. Or take the hotel room I was installed in - all alone: a huge, triple size bed, an enormous fridge with two doors and room for a sperm whale, two TVs, etc (not paid for by myself, I haste to say). Or the lunch restaurant I was taken out to - I just ordered a modest sandwich, which turned out to be a huge slab of bread with 2 inches of stuff of and gravy poured over, served on a manhole cover.
The point of this tedious rant is - why? What is the matter with America and Americans? It's like the whole nation is obsessed with wilful, stupid, obscene over-consumption on every level.
Those wetlands keep the rain from flowing straight out into the ocean; part of the reason we're in this mess now is that we've spent the last 100 years plowing them into the ground and pouring concrete over them (see: LA river).
The general tendency to cover the ground with concrete is more than half of the problem of LA, they receive more than enough rainfall every year to cover 100% of their needs but more than 99% of it runs off because that's what they designed the city to do. It's not just wetlands, it's all the lands.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fuck, this. Residential use - and even most commercial use - is completely inconsequential. California sadly has a bunch of assholes who think farming water-intensive crops in a desert is a great idea.
Meanwhile the infrastructure blows. Even when it rains, there's no real collection - ain't got nowhere to store it.
Frankly, there is no massive, critical, die, tonight-at-11-doooooom drought. There is an extinction-level stupid mismanagement problem, though.
Seriously, putting the idea out on social media would be the last thing we want. It would attract Hollywood and Greens, who would automatically come out against it because science, chemicals, energy.
Point 1 is an issue today with the small reverse-osmosis plants that several coastal cities have already built. The argument, however, runs: "R-O is expensive and we don't get much water for the size of the plant, so why put up with the ugliness?" But what if the minds of SV could come up with a technology that was ten or a hundred times more efficient than R-O, and a realistic source for city-sized volumes of water? Think of there being a square-cube law for ugliness.
Point 2 is typical swill from "environmentalists" who know nothing about science and have no real appreciation for large-scale systems. Desalination plants to not create salt; they just temporarily separate it from the water. After the water is used by humans, it makes its way back to the sea and is reunited with the salt. In fact, desalination gives us the option of leaving the salt inland, REDUCING the amount of salt in the ocean. Salt has innumerable industrial uses, and has been a prized item in commerce for millennia. Furthermore, being able to build really large desal plants would make it easier to extract all sorts of usable minerals from the concentrated brine at the output. Move enough water, and it becomes practical to do such things as extract uranium from the sea to power the plant.
Point 3: Here in Arizona, we would be glad to add more reactors to our nuclear complex in Phoenix to send more power to California. We're already making a fortune from Californians who refuse to generate their own energy.
Point 4: Yes, NIMBYism and Luddism killed the California bullet train, which all the liberals wanted until the moment construction actually started. But water is an even more vital need than transportation. Watch for thirsty farmers to start shooting lawyers while the whole nation applauds.
I've looked at the San Francisco annul rainfall for the past 150 years, and this drought was no more severe than the last few in the early 90s and late 70s, among other droughts.
You're forgetting how weather reporting has become as sensationalized as every other aspect of journalism. Cheat sheet to modern TV meteorology:
1) Every unusually cold spell is the result of a polar vortex.
2) Every severe weather event is the result of anthropologic climate change.
3) The only proper way to cover a tropical cyclone is to have a guy standing on a sea wall in a rain coat. Bonus points if you can barely understand him due to the effects of wind on his microphone.
4) Buzzwords poorly understood by the broader population (this includes most meteorologists and practically all of the ones on television) must be thrown in to consume airtime. See Item #1 and add "El Niño" and "La Niña" to the list.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Sure. Just move SoCal to Wisconsin.
SoCal is a scub/desert/swamp. That's just the way it is. Pouring water on a desert to make it anything else is the same as pouring sand on a beach to combat erosion. It looks good for a season, but nature prevails next year. You ultimately end up with exactly what nature put there to begin with.
It's all hype. This is not a "problem," it's called geography. You can't "correct" SoCal's location and geography with any technology now extant.
This. If there weren't a drought, they'd have to come up with some other means of artificially forcing ascetic behavior on everyone. That's what environmentalists do these days—keep the public's attention on them by taking things away from everyone. See also light bulbs, plastic bags, electricity conservation, etc., most of which don't actually have the results they're hoping for.
For example, any power conservation (including bulb bans) results first and foremost in a reduction of the most expensive power—baseline nuclear and/or spending towards future renewable power—not the cheapest, dirtiest power. If anything, the best way to get cleaner power is to use a lot more power to force them to build more clean power plants, then cut back usage to earlier levels and demand that they shut down coal plants through legislation. Cutting consumption first provides little to no benefit.
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Did you actually ready the article?!? It clearly stated that 11 trillion gallons is 42 cubic kilometers or if you can't do the math 42 trillion liters.
That still doesn't actually mean anything, since we rarely state rainfall in such terms. And -where- rain falls is just as important as how much, and how much of it is snow is equally as important! You could dump 11 trillion gallons on the Northern Californian coast, that won't do anything for the drought situation in the state if it all just flows down into the ocean. The state's water supply throughout the year comes from three major sources: 1) reservoirs filled during the rainy months, then continuously refilled through the spring and early summer by melting snow, 2) The snow pack which melts to feed rivers and reservoirs, 3) a groundwater reserve that has been drained and takes decades or longer to refill.
Underground natural aquifers take time to replenish. A burst of rain, even well-placed, won't do a lot to help there -- it will take years of rain and years of no longer overdrawing from the aquifers like California currently does.
A nuclear powered de-salination plant and pumping station. But good luck getting that built in Ca.
I will add to point 2.
The Gold Coast Desal plant is a 125ML RO plant and the brine is returned to the ocean. Testing has shown that you can't detect the increased salt content when more than 20m from the outlet pipe.
The biggest problem with people who think it will increase salinity of the oceans is their inability to grasp the scale of the ocean vs what is removed.