Where does water go?

[BrainGlutton]

@Sailboat

Only Blake’s post so far has focused on the key part of the OP: in California. California is different from many places in that it consumes vastly more water than falls on it as rain. That’s why water “used” in California won’t be replaced by natural rainfall as part of the water cycle.

California gets this extra water, as Blake indicated, by draining underground aquifers that took a long time to accumulate, and by taking water from surrounding jurisdictions such as the Colorado River, something its neighbors are not always happy about.

From The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, by James Howard Kunstler, chapter on Las Vegas:

Another questionable factor in Las Vegas’s future is the water supply. Las Vegas occupies the driest region in North America with the greatest extremes of temperature. Las Vegas gets four inches of natural rain a year. Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert, gets twelve inches. The springs that watered the ancient meadows Las Vegas was named after served as the city’s water supply until the 1950s. Since then, the city has had to make do with the state of Nevada’s allotment from the Colorado River. Since 1922, the Law of the Colorado River, a compact among seven western states, has ruled western water allocation, under formulae drawn up by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The law was fashioned years before the bloated hallucination of contemporary Las Vegas was even conceived, and the allocations can only be revised on the basis of an absolute consensus by all seven states, with ratification by each state’s legislature – an extremely cumbersome procedure.

Under the compact, California has long received the lion’s share of the water from the Colorado River (since 1935 impounded behind Hoover Dam in Lake Mead, with a little dribble released to its destination, the ancient delta at the top of the Bay of California in Mexico). California’s annual allocation is 4.4 million acre-feet. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to fill an acre 12 inches deep, or 325,851 gallons, or enough to theoretically supply two American families for a year. A clause in the federal act stipulates that California has absolute priority over the Colorado River’s water and is entitled to 4.4 million acre-feet before other states can receive their first drop. This was the price that California politicians exacted for their support of the enormous federal projects the compact entailed – including the Glen Canyon Dam as well as the Hoover Dam, and various pipelines, canals, and aqueducts associated with the Central Arizona Project. Nevada’s annual allocation is a measly three thousand acre-feet. (In 1922, Nevada had only eighty-one thousand inhabitants.) California is usually characterized as the bad guy in the picture. The head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Pat Mulroy, told me, “They’ve developed an attitude. They believe that they were there first. The Colorado River belongs to them. They try to con their way rather than entering into partnerships. Six states could solve those problems, but California makes it difficult.”

[FXMastermind]

Imagine how Mexico feels. They don’t get hardly any water from a river that used to run through their country. And usually the Colorado doesn’t make it anywhere close to the ocean. Not even a drop.

[Hari_Seldon]

One frightening thing about California is that some of the aquifers dry out completely and then collapse, losing their ability to even hold water if water were available. Another is that California is so paved over that even when it rains, the water runs off into the ocean because there is no open soil to absorb it.

Californians will not even allow waste water to be recycled (toilet to tap) because of the eew factor. As if all the water they use hasn’t come from sources full of animal and even human wastes. Given enough energy, California could desalinate ocean water. Fill the deserts with solar cells. It would be one way of dealing with the problem of light and dark. You could simply turn off the desalination plants at night.

[griebs]

@FXMastermind

Nobody knows exactly, but it may be gone for good.

@LSLGuy

So to answer the OP’s questions explicitly:
Where does the (fresh) water go? To the ocean, to be converted to mostly-useless salt water.

Oof. Not good. Well boys, time to cook some ocean… help curb those rising sea levels-- two birds! (And not the dove and the raven)

We must save the Maldives.

[BrightNShiny]

@Hari_Seldon

Californians will not even allow waste water to be recycled (toilet to tap) because of the eew factor.

This is completely false.

As if all the water they use hasn’t come from sources full of animal and even human wastes. Given enough energy, California could desalinate ocean water. Fill the deserts with solar cells. It would be one way of dealing with the problem of light and dark. You could simply turn off the desalination plants at night.

Nation’s largest ocean desalination plant goes up near San Diego; Future of...

[dracoi]

Here’s an interesting perspective on this from Western Washington. Most people assume that we have tons of water - it rains all the time, right? (Well, not really, but it does rain a lot).

However, the daily rain showers are not part of the drinkable/usable water supply. They run into creeks or drains and end up in Puget Sound. You just can’t capture that water in a potable source to make it useful. (Not enough of it, anyway).

Therefore, the water we actually use for drinking, irrigation, etc. mostly comes from reservoirs in the mountains and these are fed by melting snow. Our summer water depends on a healthy winter snow pack. We can be standing in a summer rain shower at the same time there’s a drought warning. Rainfall downstream might mean I water my lawn less often (some summers, not at all) but it won’t refill the reservoirs. I can’t drink it.

That’s really the key issue when we’re talking water shortages - where is the water, and is there a way to access it in a useful way?

[naita]

@FXMastermind

The scientific answer, nobody actually knows where all the water goes, or where it comes from.

It comes from the ocean, and the amount that goes into aquifers has no effect on the amount available in the ocean to continue feeding the cycle. The water trapped at subduction zones will be “lost to us” as well, but when talking about water management issues water disappearing into the desert is no more problematic than water evaporating into the air from fields.

[Baron_Skinley_Von_Clipper]

@Claverhouse

There’s estimates that any glass of water you drink in London has been drunk by and passed through at least seven others

I’d say that’s a very conservative estimate. Isn’t the water we drink today just 65 million year old dinosaur pee?

We don’t (as a planet) export water, do we?

[LSLGuy]

Here’s a pretty good explanation of the water cycle through various critters, including dinosaurs: Soda Planet

[Ornery_Bob]

• Another is that California is so paved over that even when it rains, the water runs off into the ocean because there is no open soil to absorb it. *

Oh please. California is a very large state and the vast majority of it is farmland or open land.

As for runoff from paved areas, it’s no different than for any urban/suburban area with the exception that flash floods have been a problem in So Cal since way before paving came along. The natural soil doesn’t absorb water very well at all. Let’s not forget that Southern California is either mountains, desert, or arid land. Very little of it is naturally green, except for a few months in winter. California’s usable water comes from snow pack, not rain.

[GuanoLad]

@LSLGuy

Many areas established a concept of “normal” based on rainfall in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Which subsequent science has shown to have been the wettest 50 years in the last couple thousand.

That is really interesting! I wonder if that’s true worldwide, or just for America.

[Novelty_Bobble]

I’ve been posting in another thread on the idiocy of Colorado’s prohibition on domestic water harvesting.

Through the process of reading up on it I came across a remarkable stat (apparently accurate) that in an average year only 3% of precipitation was found to make it through to stream run-off or into the deep aquifers. The rest is lost to evaporation and transpiration.
So the answer to question is, more or less “back up into the sky”

[Do_Not_Taunt]

@dracoi

Here’s an interesting perspective on this from Western Washington. Most people assume that we have tons of water - it rains all the time, right? (Well, not really, but it does rain a lot).

However, the daily rain showers are not part of the drinkable/usable water supply. They run into creeks or drains and end up in Puget Sound. You just can’t capture that water in a potable source to make it useful. (Not enough of it, anyway).

Therefore, the water we actually use for drinking, irrigation, etc. mostly comes from reservoirs in the mountains and these are fed by melting snow. Our summer water depends on a healthy winter snow pack. We can be standing in a summer rain shower at the same time there’s a drought warning. Rainfall downstream might mean I water my lawn less often (some summers, not at all) but it won’t refill the reservoirs. I can’t drink it.

That’s really the key issue when we’re talking water shortages - where is the water, and is there a way to access it in a useful way?

This has a nugget of truth, but is mostly false. Hereis an interesting set of graphs that show current snowpack, current reservoir storage, and cumulative precipitation for the current water year (which begins in October), the prior water year, and the 1984-2014 average for Seattle Public Utilities, which supplies water for about 1.4MM people, including the city of Seattle and some of the nearby suburbs.

Focusing on the current year, you’ll see there was very, very little snowpack, and what we had was gone by May. Nonetheless, the city was able to fill the reservoirs to above-average capacity at peak, which occurred in May. We then burned that off through the hot, dry summer, and the burn rate only started to level off about a month and a half ago when - get this - it started to rain.

Why I say it contains a nugget of truth is that the current reservoir storage is way below average, and this is because of low snowpack. Our burn rate was higher because there was no summer inflow from melting snow (and the warmer and dryer than average conditions increased consumption.) So that’s true. And it’s true that the agriculture in the eastern (arid) parts of the state are really suffering from lack of snowmelt. But it’s false to suggest that rain has no impact on our water situation. Even if it never snows again, Seattle can continue to provide water for 1.4MM people based just on rainfall.

[dracoi]

@Do_Not_Taunt

This has a nugget of truth, but is mostly false. Hereis an interesting set of graphs that show current snowpack, current reservoir storage, and cumulative precipitation for the current water year (which begins in October), the prior water year, and the 1984-2014 average for Seattle Public Utilities, which supplies water for about 1.4MM people, including the city of Seattle and some of the nearby suburbs.

Focusing on the current year, you’ll see there was very, very little snowpack, and what we had was gone by May. Nonetheless, the city was able to fill the reservoirs to above-average capacity at peak, which occurred in May. We then burned that off through the hot, dry summer, and the burn rate only started to level off about a month and a half ago when - get this - it started to rain.

Why I say it contains a nugget of truth is that the current reservoir storage is way below average, and this is because of low snowpack. Our burn rate was higher because there was no summer inflow from melting snow (and the warmer and dryer than average conditions increased consumption.) So that’s true. And it’s true that the agriculture in the eastern (arid) parts of the state are really suffering from lack of snowmelt. But it’s false to suggest that rain has no impact on our water situation. Even if it never snows again, Seattle can continue to provide water for 1.4MM people based just on rainfall.

Interesting. I’ll have to look into that more. Part of where I got my information is my local water district (which is near Seattle, but not the same). I wonder if they’re just blowing smoke in the name of conservation or if our situation is substantially different from Seattle’s. We’re so close that I can’t imagine it’s a huge difference in basic water supply, but it’s certainly in character for them to stretch the truth in the name of an eco-friendly cause.