Twin Satellites Circling The Globe Find California’s Losing Groundwater At A Steady Pace
The earth’s wet regions are getting wetter, and dry ones, like California, are getting drier, according to a first-of-its-kind study that used NASA satellites to track 14 years of change in how water is moving around the globe. Southern California loses the groundwater equivalent of the volume of Lake Mead every 15 years due to drought and farming. That’s 32 gigatons of water, said Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A gigaton is one cubic kilometer of water. That loss matters because groundwater makes up about one-third of our water supply.
