Dr. Famiglietti the Godfather of Groundwater Sustainability

Last week I read a very interesting Opinion piece in the NewYork Times by Jay Famiglietti who is one of the more important groundwater scientists of our time. It was a thought piece addressing what will happen if we don't protect our groundwater and it continues to disappear, will we need to move water to where our food is currently grown?  Dr Famiglietti was not really arguing for pumping the great lakes to California he was trying to highlight the coming water crisis and our need to take action.

Dr Famiglietti is currently a Global Futures Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and serves as the Director of Science for the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. He is Professor Emeritus from the University of Saskatchewan, where he was Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security. He was the founding Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley startup, Waterplan. Before that he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. From 2013 through 2018, he was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the California State Water Boards in the Santa Ana and Los Angeles regions.

I know his work best from when Dr. Famiglietti was a professor of Earth System Science and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, (2001 to 2016)  where he was the Founding Director of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling. Before that Dr Famiglietti was on the faculty of the Geological Sciences Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he and his research team including Matt Rodell developed the way to use satellites to track changing water availability around the world. They pioneered the methods to detect groundwater depletion from space using the NASA GRACE mission. 

Dr Famiglietti also has a water podcast “What About Water.” It’s good you, too, should be a listener.  Jay Famiglietti | Global Futures Professor, ASU; Podcast host, "What About Water"

I would like to quote some of the highlights of Dr. Famiglietti’s comment on groundwater.  “For over a century, America’s farmers have overpumped groundwater, and now, as the world warms and the Southwest becomes drier, the situation is only growing more dire. Rivers are slowing to a trickle, water tables are falling, land is sinking, and wells are drying up.”

Our climate has changed and will continue to change. The fantasy of renewable energy and electrification of everything stopping climate change from happening was just that a fantasy. The climate will continue to change because we have failed in both our understand and action.

On Earth Day in 2016 196 countries officially signed the Paris Climate Accord that was intended to put the nations on a course to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. The Paris Agreement aims to limit global temperature increase to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C by each nation committing to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Even if every nation met their current pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions made in the Paris Climate Accord and its updates, the reductions promised are not enough to even maintain global temperatures within 2 °C above pre-industrial levels; and the nations are not meeting those pledges.  The United States currently represents less than 14% of global carbon emissions. There is virtually nothing we as a nation can do (at this point) to stop the climate from changing. We need to adapt to the future we will face and move to a sustainable path.

As Dr Famiglietti points out: “States are aware there is a problem — many are trying to sustainably manage their groundwater. But it’s not clear how successful these efforts have been. His research team has found that groundwater depletion is accelerating in the Central Valley, in spite of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.”

In the best studied area of groundwater depletion attempts to regulate and manage it appear to be failing. The regulatory schemes so far in use appear to have failed. The groundwater management area of Virginia in the Potomac Aquifer is only doing a little better.  There will likely not be enough groundwater to accommodate future growth in the region without additional permit reductions or increasing supply through large-scale, long-term water projects.

Beyond the next few years, though, sustainability is tenuous and can easily be tipped out of balance. Potential growth in both unpermitted and permitted withdrawals can easily push demand in excess of supply, leading again to unsustainable use. Changes in the hydraulic cycle from the changing climate with impact sustainability and management of groundwater resources.

 “If we want to sustain groundwater supplies for future generations, we will need reliable estimates of what’s available in key aquifers, how its quality changes with depth and how much can be safely pumped without risk of running dry. That means we must prioritize the systematic exploration and evaluation of what’s in the ground and make a plan to end or dramatically reduce groundwater depletion.” In addition to the information needs pointed out by Dr. Famiglietti we need to further understand the use of groundwater and in the east we need to fully understand recharge and the impact of land use changes on groundwater recharge and surface water.

I encourage you to explore Dr Famiglietti’s podcasts. They are well worth your time.

Climate Change, Mankind and Groundwater

The article below consists of extracts from the USGS, U.S. Forest Service, the National Environmental Health Association YouTube presentation by Dr. Jason R. Barrett, Mr. Joel Pigg, and Dr. Sam Sherchan and the article cited below:

Benz, S.A., Irvine, D.J., Rau, G.C. et al. Global groundwater warming due to climate change. Nat. Geosci. 17, 545–551 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01453-x

 

Groundwater is ubiquitous and represents the largest distributed store of fresh water on earth playing a central role in sustaining ecosystems and enabling human communities and life. The importance of groundwater for global water and food security will probably increase as the climate warms and as more variability in precipitation (more intense droughts and more intense floods), more variability in soil moisture and surface water increase the need for and value of groundwater.

Over the past 50 years, humans have extracted the Earth’s groundwater at an ever increasing rate, largely to provide food and water for the growing global population and the support the economic development needed for all those people. Extracting groundwater beyond what is replenished will slowly over time use up the aquifer and that is a threat we have been seeing for decades. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites and the associated datasets and hydrological models have focused most of their work on resource quantity and the threat to water supply of over using groundwater beyond its recharge rate.  

Population growth and development has increased the threat to groundwater. This growth has Increased the need for water while reducing the open forested areas and natural grasslands that allow for infiltration of precipitation into the ground.  Reducing the replenishing (recharge) of the aquifer while increasing the demand for water is unsustainable combination as documented by the GRACE data trends. Groundwater is used for water supply and serves to support steam flow between rain storms. As groundwater levels fall, perennial steams that feed the rivers become intermittent and then ephemeral. The groundwater becomes disconnected from the surface water network. Groundwater comes from rainwater and snow melt percolating into the ground. 

The most obvious concern is depletion of groundwater as it becomes an increasingly important water source. As precipitation becomes less reliable due to climate change, surface water bodies can drop too low to provide needed water, causing people to turn to groundwater sources. Over-pumping and depletion of groundwater is already a significant problem in many places across the Eastern Region of the United States. Over-pumping will increase as climate change makes traditional sources of water less reliable, but there are other impacts.

Impervious surfaces prevent groundwater from soaking into the ground. Areas with a large amount of impervious surfaces (such as asphalt, concrete, buildings, etc.) not only are susceptible to flooding but are also susceptible to  higher ambient air temperatures because the man made roads, parking lots, concrete surfaces and buildings absorb and trap heat more heat than natural environments. Impervious surfaces where water runs off into local streams instead of slowly soaking into the ground act as direct routes for rainfall to make its way into streams at higher velocities, but also at poorer quality.

Rain that falls on a parking lot that has been baking in the sun all day during summer gets super heated and then runs off into streams. This heated water can be a shock to the aquatic life in the stream and can harm the water quality of the stream. Along with the heat, runoff from parking lots can contain pollutants, such as leaked motor oil, hydrocarbons from exhaust, leftover fertilizer, and normal trash. 

Temperature of water matters because warmer stream water can affect the aquatic life in the stream. Warm water holds less dissolved oxygen than cool water, and may not contain enough dissolved oxygen for the survival of different species of aquatic life. Some compounds are also more toxic to aquatic life at higher temperatures. Increasing global temperatures caused by a changing climate or the heat island effect of the expansion of the urban built environment are impacting our streams.

While work has accelerated to document the using up of our groundwater resources, there has been little work so far into groundwater quality, including temperature. This is now becoming a more important area of research. Groundwater serves as a cooling system and heat sink for the earth and delivers moderate temperature water to streams. As the impact of mankind and a changing climate increase, groundwater’s ability to cool and feed streams is reduced. Climate change is already having impacts on groundwater resources by changing the location, frequency, and intensity of rain storms. Stormwater flowing directly to streams is warmer. In manmade stormwater ponds evaporation increases contaminant concentration of the water that moves into the water table which is also warmer.  

Other research has shown that this could lead to warmer surface water bodies. Many streams depend on groundwater to maintain their cool to cold-water conditions, which are required by many organisms. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has been measuring how much water is flowing in rivers, determining the water levels of groundwater, and collecting water samples to describe the quality of those waters for over a century. Over this time period, they have taken millions of measurements of , groundwater levels, surface water flow and temperature. 

The research has found that warmer precipitation and recharge will eventually reach streams and rivers as warmer baseflow over the next decades and groundwater levels continue to fall. While a permanent water table decrease of one to three feet may not mean anything for a water supply well, it can have severe consequences for surface water bodies and ecosystems dependent on that shallow water table. In the Potomac Aquifer and the Culpeper Basin the water table has fallen by far more than that.

from EPA 2021

Global Groundwater Decline

This article highlights the important work that has been done in this area by Professors Jasecchko and Perrone of U.C, Santa Barabara and has been excerpted from the research of the study cited below. All footnotes for the statement of facts can be found in the original article.

Jasechko, S., Seybold, H., Perrone, D. et al. Rapid groundwater decline and some cases of recovery in aquifers globally. Nature 625, 715–721 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06879-8

 

In many parts of the world groundwater serves as the primary or a significant source of water for many homes, farms, industries and cities. Unsustainable groundwater use and changes in rainfall can cause groundwater levels to fall, indicating depletion of groundwater resources. Groundwater depletion can threaten ecosystems and economies. Specifically, groundwater depletion can damage infrastructure through land subsidence, impair ecosystems through streamflow depletion, jeopardize agricultural productivity, and compromise water supplies as wells run dry. Groundwater is both used for water supply and serves to support steam flow between rain storms. Groundwater comes from rainwater and snow melt percolating into the ground.

The authors analyzed groundwater-level trends for 170,000 monitoring wells and 1,693 aquifer systems in countries that encompass approximately 75% of global groundwater withdrawals. (Note that our own Virginia aquifer systems were comparatively stable over the time period.)  The authors complemented measurements from monitoring wells with data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). The GRACE mission consists of twin satellites that precisely measure the distance between them as they orbit the Earth. In this way, the satellites detect small fluctuations in the planet’s gravity, which can at large scales be translated to changes in aquifers.

The authors findings provide the most comprehensive analysis of global groundwater levels to date. The work revealed that groundwater is dropping in 71% of the aquifers. And this depletion is accelerating in many places: the rates of groundwater decline in the 1980s and ’90s has increased since 2000 to the present.  The accelerating declines are occurring in nearly three times as many places as they would expect by chance.

They found that rapid groundwater-level declines (>0.5 meter per year) are widespread in the twenty-first century, especially in dry regions with extensive croplands. Though I should note that irrigation is only necessary to make food for people.  Critically, they found that groundwater-level declines have accelerated over the past four decades in 30% of the world’s regional aquifers. This widespread acceleration in groundwater-level deepening highlights an urgent need for more effective measures to address groundwater depletion.

Their analysis also reveals specific cases in which depletion trends have been reversed following policy changes, managed aquifer recharge and surface-water diversions, demonstrating the potential for depleted aquifer systems to recover if appropriate action is taken. This should serve as a warning that our groundwater resources need to be managed sustainability. The Trends in groundwater levels were found to differ from well to well, and groundwater decline can be found even in regions in which nearby groundwater levels are stable or rising, and vice versa.  This observation highlights the importance of analyzing groundwater-level trends at the scales defined by the boundaries of individual aquifer systems.

The authors also analyzed precipitation variability over the past four decades for almost a third of the aquifers. Within this group they found that 90% of aquifers where declines were accelerating are in places where conditions have gotten drier over the last 40 years. These trends have likely reduced groundwater recharge and increased demand. They state that on the other hand, climate variability can also enable groundwater to rebound where conditions become wetter.

Their work indicates that climatic trends, hydrogeologic conditions, groundwater withdrawal rates, land uses and management approaches have resulted in widespread, rapid and accelerating groundwater-level declines. Nevertheless, the compiled in situ observations also capture numerous cases in which declines in groundwater levels have slowed, stopped or reversed following intervention.   They found that in 265 of the  aquifer systems in the analysis, groundwater-level declines have slowed or reversed, or groundwater levels have risen.

In general, rates of groundwater-level increasing are much slower than rates of groundwater-level decline. Of the aquifer systems with rising twenty-first century groundwater levels, only 6% are rising faster than −0.2 meters per year. By contrast, of the aquifer systems with deepening twenty-first century groundwater levels, 25% are falling faster than 0.2 meters per year. Furthermore, across these aquifer systems, the average rate of twenty-first century deepening exceeds the average rate of shallowing by a factor of four. Thus, rapidly rising groundwater levels are rare, but they demonstrate that aquifer recovery is possible, especially following policy changes, managed aquifer recharge, and inter-basin surface water-transfers. What this study says is we need to actively manage the groundwater (in conjunction with surface water) for a sustainable future. Remember, Of all the water on earth only about  3% is fresh; however, only ½% of the water on earth is available for mankind to use. The rest of the fresh water is locked away in ice, super deep groundwater or polluted beyond redemption.

Space X Launches new GRACE for NASA

Near the end of May, SpaceX conducted its tenth launch of the year using the flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket . In that launch, Space X’s Falcon 9 deployed five commercial Iridium communications satellites and the GRACE Follow-On Earth science mission for NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences.

The dual-satellite GRACE Follow-On mission, a partnership between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), is a successor to the GRACE satellites that ceased operations last year after fifteen years of service. In January, NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences announced that a SpaceX Falcon 9 would carry the two GRACE-FO satellites as well as five Iridium Next communications satellites into low earth orbit. Originally, it was expected to launch in early 2018, according to NASA’s fiscal year 2018 budget proposal.

The Grace Follow-On satellites had been booked to fly aboard Dnepr, while Iridium had contracted for launches of the Russian vehicle to carry pairs of its spacecraft into orbit for testing. This was not possible due in part to the political situation with Russia . Iridium and the GFZ – who are responsible for arranging GRACE’s ride to orbit – agreed to share a launch on SpaceX’s more powerful Falcon 9 rocket, splitting the costs.

While similar in design to GRACE, GRACE-FO incorporates lessons learned from 15 years of GRACE operations. The changes made will improve the new mission’s satellite performance and reliability, as well as mission operations. GRACE-FO will also fly a technology demonstration of a new, more precise inter-satellite laser ranging interferometer, developed by a German/U.S. instrument team, for use in future generations of GRACE-like missions.GRACE maps Earth's gravity field by making accurate measurements of the distance between the two satellites, using GPS and a microwave ranging system. This allows scientists all over the world an efficient and accurate way to map Earth's gravity field.

GRACE data has provided a global picture of water storage trends for over a decade and could be an invaluable tool for understanding water resource availability. The GRACE mission is able to monitor monthly water storage changes on the planet. Regardless of whether water is solid, liquid or vapor, visible or invisible, it has mass, which exerts a gravitational pull. By tracking the changing pull of gravity very precisely around Earth, the U.S./German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, mission observed the movement of water around our planet from 2002 to 2017 -- from the top of the Himalayas to the depths of the ocean to deep underground. GRACE Follow-On will continue GRACE’s critical mission of tracking the evolution of Earth’s water cycle by monitoring changes in the distribution of mass on Earth.

Maintaining a consistent, continuous climate data record of water and mass transport in the Earth system over decades is essential to understand and differentiate short-term climate variability from long-term climate change. Because some climate patterns take several decades to unfold, the only way to determine whether a multi-year trend is representative of a long-term change is to extend the length of the observational record. Monitoring changes in ice sheets and glaciers, underground water storage, the amount of water in large lakes and rivers, and changes in sea level provides a unique view of Earth’s evolving climate and its water and energy cycles, with far-reaching societal benefits.

• Tracking mass changes of Earth's polar ice sheets. 
• Estimating global groundwater storage changes. 
• Measuring mass changes caused by large earthquakes. 
• Inferring changes in deep ocean currents, a driving force in climate. 

We Need Sustainable Groundwater Use in Virginia

USGS  2010

According to the U.S. Geological Survey estimates for 2010 Virginia uses 299 million gallons of groundwater each and every day which is about 20% of all fresh water consumed daily in Virginia (this excludes use for thermal electric power generation). Of this groundwater use the three largest categories of use are public supply groundwater wells (71 million gallons a day), private/rural water wells (124 million gallons a day) and self-supplied industrial wells (74 million gallons a day) Domestic water use includes indoor and outdoor use at homes and apartments in Virginia for drinking, food preparation, washing clothes and dishes, bathing and flushing toilets. Common outdoor uses are watering lawns and gardens or maintaining pools or landscape features at your home. Domestic water is either self-supplied or provided by public water companies. Industrial use would be manufacturing sites including paper mills, printing companies, breweries and wineries. Public supply water wells supply community domestic and commercial needs like churches, schools and offices.

According to the USGS data, the 124 million gallons a day of self-supplied domestic water from private wells provides 1,650,000 Virginians or 21% of the population of the Commonwealth with their water. These rural or semi-rural wells are drilled in rural or semi-rural locations throughout Virginia. Nationally only about 14% of domestic water is from private wells. The typical Virginian uses 75 gallons of water a day for all domestic uses and is the same for public supplies households as well as households supplied by private well. In most states, households on private well use less water than those on public water supplies.

Despite being a very rural state, less than 3% of fresh water withdrawn from rivers, streams, and groundwater is used for agriculture. It rains in Virginia and only 1.4% of fresh water is used for irrigation which includes water for crop irrigation, frost protection, application of chemicals, weed control, field preparation, crop cooling, harvesting, dust suppression, as well as watering of golf courses, parks, nurseries, turf farms, cemeteries, and landscape-watering for businesses and public buildings.

At one firth of the total water supply groundwater is an important component of the water supply. Sustainable groundwater use in Virginia is not tracked or managed by DEQ or any other agency for that matter. Groundwater is not unlimited. Our groundwater is at risk. Despite the water rich climate of our region, the Atlantic Coastal Plain aquifer is under stress and is being used beyond it recharge rate. This has been confirmed by measurements of groundwater levels, modeling of the aquifer system by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and measurements of changes in gravity by the GRACE satellite project at NASA over the past 12 years of data collecting.

The rate of groundwater withdrawal from the Virginia Coastal Plain is currently unsustainable. The withdrawal rate of groundwater increased continuously during the 20th century. By the 2003 the withdrawal rates from Coastal Plain aquifers in Virginia totaled approximately 117 million gallons per day (DEQ). As a result, groundwater levels have declined by as much as 200 feet near the large withdrawal centers of West Point and Franklin, Virginia the home of paper mills that are large industrial users of groundwater. The water level has continued to fall despite the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ) attempting to regulate groundwater withdrawals in the Virginia Coastal Plain through the VA DEQ Groundwater Withdrawal Permit Program over the past 12 years. To make that groundwater sustainable, we need to reduce use or increase recharge otherwise Virginia will find that areas within the historic boundary of the aquifer begin to go dry. In order to prevent this first Virginia needs to know how much groundwater there is and what is sustainable use is. Groundwater resources are property and should be protected for all property owners.

Less is known about the sustainability of the smaller groundwater basins in the region, but their problems are still at a more manageable stage. Our own Culpeper Basin that feeds the private wells in the Rural Crescent of Prince William and areas of Loudoun and Fauquier counties as well as areas beyond our region. We now have tools (groundwater models and data from the GRACE project) that can help develop a picture of the volume of the water within the groundwater basin and at what rate it is being used and at what rate it is being recharged. We need to know if the current and planned use of our groundwater is sustainable even in drought years. An understanding of the impact on our essential water resources from ground cover by roads and buildings impacting recharge to proposed water withdrawals can be used to determine if a proposed additional use of groundwater is sustainable before it is granted.

How any proposed land use, or business or building impact water and groundwater sustainability should be one of the first questions asked. The right of existing property owners to their water is primary and valuable and should not be compromised or impaired to generate profits for others by the taking of their rights to their water. Because there are natural fluctuations in groundwater levels it is easy to mask or ignore signs of the beginnings of destruction of the water resources that we depend on. The USGS has been smoothing the water level data from at least one well in our region to eliminate what appeared to be an anomaly, but instead may be the first indications of a problem. Fluctuations in climate or rainfall and imperfect measurements and vantage points mask trends from clear view.

How the resource is owned or not owned can potentially create a resource abusive atmosphere where taking what I can without regard for sustainability is rewarded for a period of time. No groundwater resource is infinite and we need to preserve and protect our groundwater which belongs to all the landowners by recognizing its value, that it is property and by using it sustainably. The permitting process for zoning changes and building permits for large users of groundwater needs to examine and consider the impact on and sustainable use of groundwater resources in that area. The rights to groundwater need to be quantified, so they can be protected.

NASA to Help Manage California’s Water Resources

Water is fundamental to life on Earth. Knowing where and how much rain and snow falls is vital to understanding how weather and climate impact our environment, including the effects on agriculture, fresh water availability and natural disasters. Nowhere is this better seen than in California. The California Water Plan, a regular analysis published by the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) is the major guide book for water planning within the state. The latest version of the Plan was released for public review in January 2009 and updated in 2013. It stated: “We must adapt and evolve California’s water systems more quickly and effectively to keep pace with ever changing conditions now and in the future. Population is growing while available water supplies are static and even decreasing.”

The powerful Pacific storm that brought rain and snow late last week through much of California. Communities endangered by wildfire just weeks ago, faced mud and debris landslides and flash floods. The much prayed for rain came in a massive deluge as it often does. On Friday 4.3 inches of rain fell on Los Angeles almost three times as much rain as had fallen in the region since July. The parched ground and hillsides stripped bare by wildfires were less able to absorb water and several communities experienced mudslides and flash floods. The storm front moved on to the east bringing more snow to the east coast.

Despite the enormity of the deluge, these storms will not rescue the region from the three years of below-normal rainfall, California still looks to be facing its most severe drought in decades. It would take rainfall of almost biblical proportions to make up the water shortfall that California faces. If you recall Governor Jerry Brown has declared a drought emergency and water allocations had been cut to zero by state and federal water manages. Though, this storm did bring some relief to rural and smaller communities especially in Northern California whose water supply was forecast to run dry in the next two months.

In the past California’s state water agencies could not even track how much water is actually being used, where it is being used, where it is being diverted to, how much is being diverted, or how many diversions are illegal. The ability to track water usage and accurate long range forecasts of precipitation would allow California water manages to better capture and store the precious water. The California DWR announced last week that they will be working with NASA to apply new technology to better understand, monitor and manage the state's water resources and respond to its droughts and changing water needs. NASA scientists, university researchers and DWR water managers will work together to apply advanced remote sensing and improved forecast modeling to better assess water resources, monitor drought conditions and water supplies, plan for drought response and mitigation, and measure drought impacts.

DWR first began working with NASA on the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) to quantify groundwater depletion. A group of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Texas, and the Hydrological Sciences Branch at NASA GSFC have worked in partnership to apply GRACE and GLDAS to various real world groundwater monitoring with funding from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The GRACE scientific team will launch the next generation of GRACE satellites able to monitor groundwater changes on a weekly basis and to be able to monitor groundwater and river basins that are 1,000 square miles in area. In addition, this partnership will provide the resources to interpret the date in a more timely fashion so that communities can use it to manage water resources in real time.

In California's Central Valley groundwater was pumped to such an extent that the ground subsided more than 75 feet in some places. The area was identified by the research efforts of Joseph Poland in the 1970’s as the location of maximum subsidence in the United States due to groundwater mining. Once the land subsides, it loses its water holding capacity and will never recover as an aquifer. Recent GRACE data has indicated that the groundwater level is once more falling due to over pumping. The groundwater resources of the state need to be managed with the surface water resources and the partnership with NASA holds promise of providing tools to do just that.

In addition, NASA is now planning on using their remote sensing data and research to monitor the California delta levees; map fallowed agricultural lands; and improve estimates of precipitation, water stored in the winter snowpack, and changes in groundwater resources. The agencies also are working to combine data from NASA satellites and DWR's network of agricultural weather stations to improve estimates of crop water requirements for California farmers seeking to better manage irrigation.

Next month, NASA and DWR will resume flights of NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory to map the snowpack of the Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierra Nevada and the Uncompahgre watershed in the Upper Colorado River Basin. The Tuolumne watershed is the source of the water supply for 2.6 million San Francisco Bay Area residents. The airborne observatory measures how much water is in the snowpack and how much sunlight the snow absorbs, which in turn affects how fast the snow melts. This information would allow NASA and DWR to make accurate estimates of how much water will flow out of a basin when the snow melts. Last year, observatory data helped water managers optimize reservoir filling and more efficiently allocate water between power generation, water supplies and ecological uses.

Another pilot project is demonstrating the feasibility of using satellite imagery to track the extent of fallowed land -- cultivated land intentionally allowed to lie idle during growing season. NASA is working with DWR, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and California State University at Monetary Bay to establish a fallowed land monitoring service as part of a California drought early warning information system. New methods using time-series of crop data from NASA and USGS satellites can provide information on land fallowing and reductions in planted acreage early in the year. The team is preparing to produce data and maps of fallowed acreage in the Central Valley beginning this April to help monitor the impacts of the ongoing drought.

Over the next seven years NASA plans to launch four additional water-related satellites to add to the more than a dozen NASA satellites focused on understanding detailed Earth science processes. NASA also monitors Earth from ground-based observation posts. NASA is working to develop new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems using the long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing and contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

These programs are not going to increase the water available to California, and they will likely reduce individual choice, but they may allow the state to rationally manage the resources available to it. I say maybe because California and its population has demonstrated an inability to face and accept harsh truths and plan rationally for the future. There seems to be a tendency to engage in magical thinking. Hope for the best, plan for the worst and carefully monitor the facts of the situation.

GRACE Watches Building Water Crisis

Earlier this month Dr. Jay Famiglietti, a professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine, and Director of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling (UCCHM) and Matt Rodell, now Chief of the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have published an new paper in Science entitled, “Water in the Balance.” The scientists draw conclusions and trend from the ten years of data that has come from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) to quantify groundwater depletion. A group of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Texas, and the Hydrological Sciences Branch at NASA GSFC have worked in partnership to apply GRACE and GLDAS to various real world groundwater monitoring.

GRACE data has provided a global picture of water storage trends for over a decade and could be an invaluable tool for understanding water resource availability. The GRACE mission is able to monitor monthly water storage changes within river basins and aquifers that are 77,000 square miles or larger. While this area may be too large for community water management, it can be used on the regional and national scale, and to aide international policy discussions. This information could someday be used to develop a unifying principal of cross border water resource allocation. Now, though, the first use has been to study the trends on groundwater in various regions during this period.

Stressed aquifers are in yellow, orange and red

Dr. Famiglietti points out that groundwater represents almost half of all drinking water worldwide, though a lesser proportion of irrigation water. In the United States groundwater is an important natural resource, representing about 30% of all consumptive water use especially in those parts of the country that don't have ample surface-water sources, such as the arid West and in times of drought. Groundwater is a renewable resource, but not in the way that sun light is. Groundwater recharges at various rates from precipitation. Changes in rainfall patterns and the actions of man can impact the recharge rate of groundwater. Increasing the amount of impermeable area by paving or building and other changes to land cover can reduce groundwater recharge. The climate of the planet has continually changed over the millennia and some groundwater aquifers are legacies of an earlier climate and are not being recharged.

To recharge groundwater, it must rain and the soil must be able to absorb the water. When you withdraw the groundwater from fine-grained compressible sediments and do not replace it, the land subsides. In the pursuit of wealth the ground water in the incredibly fertile Central Valley was pumped to such an extent that the ground subsided more than 75 feet in some places. The area was identified by the research efforts of Joseph Poland as the location of maximum subsidence in the United States due to groundwater mining. Once the land subsides, it loses its water holding capacity and will never recover as an aquifer. Groundwater mining in the Central Valley was believed to have slowed in the past few decades, but it continues as documented by the recent data from Drs. Famiglietti and Rodell’s work and the continual falling of the groundwater level.

Though, ten years of data may not be adequate to determine accurate changes in water availability and groundwater recharge. Using GRACE data, Drs. Famiglietti and Rodell identified what appear to be in this 10 year window water ‘hotspots’ in the United States, and these include the important food producing regions in California’s Central Valley, and the southern High Plains; large areas of the southeastern U. S. that has been plagued by persistent drought, including Houston, Texas, Alabama, and portions of the Mid-Atlantic region. Based on the data since 2003, the wetter, northern half of the U.S. has become wetter, while the drier, southern half has become generally drier.

Dr. Rodell hopes to have the next generation of satellites able to monitor groundwater changes on a weekly basis and to be able to monitor groundwater and river basins that are closer to 1,000 square miles in area. In addition, to have the resources to interpret the date in a more timely fashion so that communities can use it to manage water resources in real time. Our water resources are the urgent need. Water is life. We must develop sustainable water, economic and agricultural policies to ensure the certainty and security of our food supply and water supply. If the water use is not sustainable, then ultimately we are not sustainable on a much shorter scale than climate change.

Using Up the Ogallala- The Groundwater Footprint of the U.S.

The High Plains aquifer commonly known as the Ogallala aquifer (because the Ogallala formation makes up about three quarters of the aquifer) became news and burst into public awareness due to the protests associated with the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Keystone XL Pipeline has been very controversial. Most of the environmental controversy has focused on the porous soils of the Sandhills and fears of a possible oil leak into the Ogallala aquifer which is one of the nation's most important agricultural aquifers. Moving the pipeline away from the aquifer or piping the Canadian oil through British Columbia should mitigate concern for contamination to the Ogallala, but oil leaks are a minor problem. Really, the oil does not move quickly or spread easily through the sedimentary deposits of the High Plains aquifer. There is a much bigger threat to the Ogallala; the aquifer is being depleted because the groundwater within it is predominately non-renewable. This groundwater aquifer that spans and estimated 174,000 square miles is the primary source of water for the High Plains. This was open range land until the groundwater from the aquifer was used to turn the range land into irrigated crops. However, according to John Opie in “Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land” this is essentially fossil water that was generated 10,000-25,000 years ago by the melting of the glaciers of the Rockies.

Water level declines in the High Plains Aquifer since 1958 

The High Plains aquifer is the most intensively used aquifer in the United States and 97% of the water is used for irrigation. Groundwater withdrawals from the High Plains aquifer represent about 20% of all groundwater withdrawals within the United States and have turned the dry range land in the center of the country into the breadbasket of the world. There are only about 2.5 million people living within the High Plains aquifer. With the grains we grow and export we are exporting our water reserves and possibly the future of the region. The High Plains aquifer is being depleted (and contaminated) by irrigation. In the central and southern High Plains water levels have fallen from 50 to more than 150 feet primarily in parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas.  

In  the past year Drs. Tom Gleeson, Yoshihide Wada, Marc F.P. Bierkens and Lodovicus P.H. van Beek each a distinguished voice in groundwater research have pulled together to try to popularize the concept of Groundwater Footprint in order to focus attention on the sustainability of groundwater use. While I think the “global groundwater footprint” is not particularly useful beyond seeing how important groundwater use is globally, their groundwater footprint concept may end up being a very powerful tool. Water is regional and while the authors of “Water Balance of Global Aquifers Revealed by Groundwater Footprint” point out that some groundwater consumption can be transferred to an adjacent aquifer (they use the Upper and Lower Ganges aquifers in India as their example) more often water use and recharge are a dictated by local conditions. An excess of water along the Amazon basin is not particularly useful to Saudi Arabia. However, the authors measurement of “groundwater footprint” is really a measure of groundwater sustainability. A groundwater footprint is a simplified tool to see the water balance between recharge and use of an aquifer and could be used to include groundwater sustainability in developing water, economic and agriculture policies using the virtual water and water footprint analysis. If the water use is not sustainable, then ultimately we are not sustainable.

Groundwater footprint, as the authors point out, could be used with the satellite-based Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) to quantify groundwater depletion. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Texas, and the Hydrological Sciences Branch at NASA GSFC have worked in partnership to apply GRACE and GLDAS to real world groundwater monitoring. As these tools develop, the groundwater footprint could end up being an intuitive management tool. The authors found that 80% of the world’s aquifers are not being depleted, but that of the 20% that are being depleted are being depleted at such a vast rate that the global average footprint is of unsustainable groundwater use. In the United States the High Plains and the Central Valley aquifers are being depleted. We as a nation need to examine our agricultural policies and incentives, even our energy policies (corn for ethanol is squandering 40% of the corn crop and the non-renewable water in it to dilute gasoline) and the way we value and price water to ensure that we will have food in the future. 

Water Sustainability and Charles Fishman’s “The Big Thirst”

“The Earth's surface is 71 percent covered in water, and water is the primary force shaping every element of the character of the planet — the geology, the weather, the range and variety of life, the planet's gleaming profile in space…”
…”The total water on the surface of Earth (the oceans, the ice caps, the atmospheric water) makes up 0.025 percent of the mass of the planet — 25/100,000ths of the stuff of Earth.”
“…Scientists don't agree on the precise age of the water on Earth, but it's certainly 4.3 or 4.4 or 4.5 billion years old. It's one of the more astonishing things about water — all the water on Earth was delivered here when Earth was formed, or shortly thereafter…in the first 100 million years or so. There is, in fact, no mechanism on Earth for creating or destroying large quantities of water. What we've got is what's been here, literally, forever…”

The quotes above are from Charles Fishman’s book, The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. It is a very elegant and well researched story of how water is used throughout our economies and is the basis of all life and wealth. However, his discussion of water does not clearly focus on the sustainability of our water supply. Mr. Fishman clearly identifies that the water infrastructure is not being adequately maintained in the United States and does not adequately exist in much of the rest of the world. Vast amounts of water leaks from our delivery system, but is not necessarily lost from the water cycle. The real problem is that we are not only mining our water reserves, we are destroying the methods that nature stores fresh water that allows us to have a predictable and reliable supply of water. We as a nation and mankind need to address both problems. The need for water is constant it does not come and go with the weather. The need for water grows with population and wealth. All the ways that water supports our lives are discussed in the book making it well worth reading. There is adequate fresh water in the United States, but it is not delivered uniformly or when we need it. The Mississippi has flooded vast portions of the Midwest while Texas has been having a drought.

Water is our most valuable resource and how we manage its use or allow its abuse may determine the fate of our country and mankind. According to the US Geological Survey about 26 % of the freshwater used in the United States in 2000 came from ground-water sources; the other 74 % came from surface water. Groundwater is an important natural resource, especially in those parts of the country that don't have ample surface-water sources, such as the arid West and in times of drought. Groundwater is a renewable resource, but not in the way that sun light is. Groundwater recharges at various rates from precipitation. The actions of man can impact the recharge rate of groundwater. Changing land use and increasing the amount of impermeable area by paving or building can reduce groundwater recharge.

When you withdraw the groundwater from fine-grained compressible confining beds of sediments and do not replace it, the land subsides. In the pursuit of wealth the ground water in the incredibly fertile Central Valley was pumped to such an extent that the ground subsided more than 75 feet in some places. The area was identified by the research efforts of Joseph Poland as the location of maximum subsidence in the United States due to groundwater mining. Once the land subsides, it looses its water holding capacity and will never recover as an aquifer. Groundwater mining in the Central Valley was believed to have slowed in the past few decades, but it continues as documented by the recent data from the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, GRACE.

The twin satellites of the GRACE program monitor each other while orbiting the Earth, and produce some of the most precise data ever collected on the planet’s gravitational variations. This information is used to determine the changes in ice, snow, groundwater basins, and surface water from season to season and over time. Though the amount of water on Earth is static, the location of the water and its availability for use by man does change. The GRACE program reports that from October 2003 to March 2010, aquifers under the state’s Central Valley were drawn down by 25 million acre-feet — almost enough to fill Lake Mead, California’s and the nation’s largest reservoir. The GRACE program also identified several other areas of the earth where groundwater levels have fallen. These areas include northern India, North Africa, and northeastern China.

California is my usual canary in the mine for water resource management and mismanagement. They have all the resources of knowledge and wealth available to mankind and yet struggle with the politics of addressing their impending water crisis. California local water agencies have invested in water recycling, conservation, groundwater storage and other strategies to stretch supplies, but the demand for cheap water exceeds supply as evidenced by the unsustainable groundwater usage. Year round agriculture that supplies food to the nation (grapes, almonds, avocados, lemons, melons, peaches, plums, and strawberries, oranges, apricots, dates, figs, kiwi fruit, nectarines, olives, pistachios, prunes, and walnuts, garlic, tomatoes, lettuce, cattle and calves) has been made possible by the ample supply of water used for irrigation. The limit to California’s agricultural bounty and the wealth of the ranch owners is water availability.

The water available is a combination of surface water diversions and groundwater pumping. In 2006 before the beginning of the last drought, California used almost 31 billion gallons of water a day for irrigation. This is 351 gallons of water a day for each agricultural dollar earned each year and represents almost 80% of the water used in the state each year (excluding non consumptive power usage). All attempts to reduce water usage have been directed to California residential communities to reduce their per capita water use 20% by 2020. The water that is allocated to agriculture remains cheap water. Food needs to reflect the real cost of the water and the permanent loss of ground water. There is not enough water to support the total level of agriculture in the state. Even as the per capita water usage falls the total water used will grow with the population, but there will be no growth in the water supply for the state and if climate projects are at all true, then there will be less water delivered by snowfall and rain. As documented by GRACE California has continued to make up the short fall in water by using more groundwater than recharges and the groundwater table continues to fall. Water is wealth and life. California is spending its wealth on agriculture in the Central Valley growing cheap walnuts for China and grapes and strawberries for me and when it is gone they will leave behind a desert with water pipes running south to Los Angeles.