When drought strikes, California farmers often pump water from underground aquifers to water their crops. But increasingly dry conditions are straining that resource. “On average, over time, we have been extracting more water from the subsurface than has been recharged,” says David Freyberg of Stanford University. He says many people are looking at ways to replenish the state’s dwindling groundwater supplies.
Increasingly strong storms are responsible for more than a third of the nation’s flood costs, swelling the tab by billions of dollars a year as climate change continues to fuel more extreme weather, according to new research at Stanford University.
Sewage data analyzed in Silicon Valley wastewater treatment plants confirms that the latest wave of coronavirus infections is sharply worse than the ones in the spring and summer.
Officials in Santa Clara County have been routinely testing solid waste samples in sewage to detect levels of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 as part of a project funded by Stanford University.
A century after the state began overseeing surface water, the California legislature enacted a set of three laws regulating water below the surface. The passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014, granted the state official oversight authority of groundwater. However, its involvement existed long before SGMA and continues to influence current policies and regulation of the resource. A new paper published in Society and Natural Resources, examines how the state’s ongoing involvement helped shape current policies by looking at the 120-year history of California’s role in groundwater management and policy development.
Much like solving a mystery, making informed water management decisions in California involves finding and investigating all necessary information. With data scattered across multiple locations, the process of accessing and analyzing the information can be an arduous task.
Across the United States, underground labyrinths of leaky pipes lose more than a trillion gallons of water a year — and the problem is mirrored around the world.
“It’s a huge problem, especially in the cities,” said Daniel Tartakovsky, a professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University in California. Tartakovsky and his former student Abdulrahman Alawadhi from the University of California, San Diego have proposed a way to improve a traditional method of detecting these leaks.
This bipolar weather will have profound implications for the state’s $50 billion agriculture industry and the elaborate network of reservoirs, canals, and aqueducts that store and distribute water. A system built for irrigation and flood protection must adapt to accommodate more conservation. “The effects of climate change are necessitating wholesale changes in how water is managed in California,” the state Department of Water Resources wrote in a June, 2018 white paper.During droughts, farmers and municipalities pumped groundwater to augment sparse surface supplies. After nearly a century of heavy use, many aquifers are badly depleted.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
