“We now know how much groundwater is going into and coming out of the aquifers during each season of the year, and during periods of drought and episodes of heavy precipitation,” Donald Argus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said.
The volume of the inflow was surprising, according to Argus, because researchers believed they already had a good understanding of the amount of water entering and leaving the Central Valley.
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| Source: Tulare Voice |
This new understanding could be used, for example, to modify existing restrictions on watering during dry years versus wet years to better match usage with the available groundwater resources.
In a recent study, scientists found that a previously unmeasured source – water percolating through soil and fractured rock below California’s Sierra Nevada mountains – delivers an average of 4 million acre feet (5 cubic kilometers) of water to the state’s Central Valley each year. This underground source accounts for about 10% of all the water that enters this highly productive farmland each year from every source (including river inflows and precipitation).
