Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Excellent, I love a nice warm dessert. You can never have enough pie.
that we not get it all at once please.
It's about 0.37% of Lake Superior...
Anyway... according to the news and Google they've received about 10Trillion gallons of rain in the past 10 days SO guess problem solved ;-)
Is that a lot? I mean compared to rainfall over that area.
It is about 10cm or 4 inches spread over the entire state.
There are 264 gallons per cubic meter. So 11 trillion gallons is 4.16e10 m^3. California has an area of 424,000 km^2, or 4.24e11 m^2. So divide the volume by the area, and you get the depth = 4.16e10/4.24e11 = 0.098 m or 9.8 cm or about 4 inches.
I live in San Jose, and we have gotten more than 4 inches of rain in the last week, and it is still raining. There are areas of California (the Mojave Desert) that get a lot less, but also areas (the North Coast) that get a lot more.
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.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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).
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.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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.
If you set 11000 Libraries of Congress on fire, it would be enough to put the fire out.
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.
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
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.
Apply some of that massive Silicon Valley brainpower to developing large-scale desalination instead of the next batch of faddish social media apps.
I just tweeted out your idea to see if we can get it trending.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.