NASA Experts: California Needs 11 Trillion Gallons to End Drought, While Southwest States “Not Sharing a Drop of Water”

Rain has returned to California, taking pressure off of the immediate emergency of the ongoing drought via the help of several inches of recent rainfall. But the Golden State loses about 4 trillion gallons per year, and would need roughly three times that amount to return to safe and normal levels. “Recent rains are no reason to let up on our conservation efforts,” Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board stated. The same NASA experts who sounded the alarm over the drought’s threat to the food supply are now warning that California needs some 11 trillion gallons of water to replenish to normal levels. Eleven trillion gallons — that’s the amount of water that NASA scientists say would be needed to replenish key California river basins in what they’re calling the first-ever estimate of the water necessary to end an episode of drought. That 11 trillion gallons is the deficit in normal seasonal levels that NASA said a team found earlier this year in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. The GRACE data, presented Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, showed those river basins losing about 4 trillion gallons per year — more than state residents use annually, NASA said. Adding to this challenge, neighboring and nearby states in the Southwest with whom California shares some water rights have been meeting recently over the water emergencies – and making clear that it will NOT BE SHARING any additional water with the parched state: “If anybody thought we were going to roll over and say, ‘OK, California, you’re in a really bad drought, you get to use the water that we were going to use,’ they’re mistaken,” said James Eklund, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board “Arizona has the same interest” as Colorado in ensuring its supply is protected, said Michael J. Lacey, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.



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