More Water

The other day a friend of mine attempted to drive across a field that he thought looked dry and he ended up stuck. Eventually a truck with a wench had to be brought over to pull him out of the field. My point being....Things are really wet outside.

Unfortunately, even with all of this water renewing ponds, vernal pools, swales, marshes and wetlands, the sum total is not yet enough to pull California out of its current drought. Californians have become good at storing, transfering, using, and even, sometimes.... conserving water.

Initially, storage was planned before we were very good at storing water for ourselves. The Sierra Nevadas store water in the form of snow, and in a good year that snow doesn't melt completely until May or June. This is the storage system we can expect to see reduced over time as temperatures warm and less moisture is dumped as snow pack. Fortunately, as of January 29th, the water content of the snow pack is 115% of normal.

Groundwater is another natural storage system we depend on. And this is the storage that has been on my mind lately. So I did some studying.

Florin, where I live, used to have a water table (which is depth of the surface of groundwater below the land surface) at about eight feet. Since it was so close to the surface, all that was necessary to draw it up was a good windmill. Florin was the strawberry capital back then and the landscape was dotted with windmills bringing up groundwater for irrigation. Some said it reminded them of Holland. (see above picture)

Well, things have changed. According to the USGS website, the water table is about 80 feet below the surface. Before the drought we've endured, it was around 70 feet. We have a very bad habit of using more than our fair share of resources.

Now we have complimented these natural storage reservoirs with some man made reservoirs, mainly damns. California can store around 9 million acre feet (MAF)of water in its reservoirs alone. An acre foot is the amount of water it would take to fill an acre of land one foot deep. That isn't counting the natural lakes which also store water.

The problem in California is that we get most of our precipitation in the winter and use most of our water in the summer (mainly for crop irrigation) and most of our precipitation in Northern California, while we use most of it in Southern California.

If climate shapes up the way its expected to, with warmer temperatures and thus less snow, we are going to have to find some ways to use less water in the summer.

Here is a link to interesting water information.