Eye in the Sky on Texas’ Water Supply
A satellite can monitor Texas' water situation by measuring gravity fields. Photo courtesy flickr.com/cogdogAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Water in Texas can be confusing. There’s a lot of rules, agencies, and uncertainty involved. But trying to sort through that confusion and present the public with a detailed look at water supplies in the state is Jay Famiglietti, a professor at the University of Calfornia, Irvine. He sat down with Terrence Henry of StateImpact Texas to talk about what the water situation in the state looks like from space, using a satellite called GRACE, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment.
There’s a couple of disturbing trends that we see in our data. One is the more general Southeastern drought trend; that’s hit Texas pretty hard, and we’ve seen little towns run out of water and have to have it trucked in. The other region that’s getting hit pretty hard is the Panhandle. There’s a lot of groundwater depletion that’s evident there, in the southern part of the High Plains, or Ogallala Aquifer, that stretches all across the High Plains, the central Plains, and it’s the biggest groundwater resource we have in the country. And the southern part’s being depleted at a pretty rapid clip in Texas.
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