Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Monday, July 28, 2014
Satellites show major Southwest groundwater loss
Groundwater losses from the Colorado River basin appear massive enough to challenge long-term water supplies for the seven states and parts of Mexico that it serves, according to a new study released Thursday that used NASA satellites.
Researchers from NASA and the University of California, Irvine say their study is the first to quantify how much groundwater people in the West are using during the region's current drought.
Stephanie Castle, the study's lead author and a water resource specialist at the University of California, Irvine, called the extent of the groundwater depletion "shocking."
"We didn't realize the magnitude of how much water we actually depleted" in the West, Castle said.
Since 2004, researchers said, the Colorado River basin — the largest in the Southwest — has lost 53 million acre feet, or 17 trillion gallons, of water. That's enough to supply more than 50 million households for a year, or nearly fill Lake Mead — the nation's largest water reservoir — twice.
Three-fourths of those losses were groundwater, the study found.
Unlike reservoirs and other above-ground water, groundwater sources can become so depleted that they may never refill, Castle said. For California and other western states, the groundwater depletion is drawing down the reserves that protect consumers, farmers and ecosystems in times of drought. The Colorado River basin supplies water to about 40 million people and 4
million acres of farmland in seven states — California, Arizona,
Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming — as well as to people
and farms in part of Mexico...more
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