Much of the West is already experiencing severe to exceptional drought, but scorching summer temperatures will dry out the parched landscape even more. These maps illustrate the seriousness of the western drought.
Kyra Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that during droughts, many areas can pump water out of the ground to compensate for the lack of surface water. Much of this groundwater supports agricultural industries in California.
However, drought also affects groundwater levels. Groundwater data from NASA, shown in the map at the top of this page, indicate that some areas in the Southwest contain only around 2 percent of their average groundwater for this time of the year. “California has experienced about 100 years of groundwater depletion, much of which occurs during drought periods,” said Jay Famiglietti, the executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan. “Research in review from our team indicates that the rate of depletion may actually be accelerating since 2019, relative to the previous droughts of 2006-2010 and 2011-2016.”Climate change also slows the replenishment of groundwater.
In California, the majority of pumped groundwater is also ancient groundwater from the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice and snow covered the terrain. “It’s really old groundwater, and we were essentially not getting that with one year’s worth of rain or one year’s worth of snow,” Kim said.The Rocky Mountains are another important source of water for many western states.
For winter 2022, Rocky Mountain snowpack tracked close to the long-term average until March, then April was “horribly dry,” said Leanne Lestak, who works with Molotch on modeling snow water equivalent across the Sierra and the Rockies.As of April 1, snow water equivalent over most areas ranged from 46 to 95 percent of the long-term average, as shown in the modeled data below.
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