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Colorado River Drought Forces a Painful Reckoning for States - NYTimes.com
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0510224444.htm
Nearly 10 years ago I attended a session at a conference on the usage of remote sensing (satellites) to monitor vegetation health on a daily basis and the resulting change in irrigation strategy. The conference session was sponsored and chaired by members of the Cotton Growers association and many of the papers presented focused on the gross disparity between water consumption and supply.
The introductory keynote speaker showed groundwater level changes over the past century focusing on the percentage change in aquifers that were 10s of thousands of years old and the sheer impossibility of ever recharging these aquifers even if the Colorado River was completely untapped. Many slides showed the telltale irrigation circles that everyone sees when flying over the western states and denoted how much water was being used by agriculture in general and the cotton industry in particular.
The following session papers covered a number of monitoring techniques using existing and planned sensing platforms both public and private to get near immediate feedback on plant health and adjust how much water was pumped into the fields as a result. The main takeaway from several of the papers presented was that both over and under watering was a serious concern for the cotton growers as both conditions adversely effected the total yield of the crop, but that over watering was a HUGE issue for overall water policy as the population in the region continued to climb and the demand for more vegetables and crops continued to increase.
I eavesdropped on conversations among the few Cotton Growers Association people present between presentations and the overall consensus among those in attendance was that this all sounded really cool, but who would pay for the support structure necessary to conduct such monitoring? The growers had no money to foot that bill nor desire to pay taxes to support it, and even if the U.S. Govt took on the task for the greater good the growers would have no really good way to make use of the data. Apparently many of them had to schedule their irrigation with the various local water authorities so far in advance that they could barely make use of even rudimentary monitoring as it was.
I had only attended the session out of pure curiosity as I had no vested interest in any part of the discussion, but I left the room feeling pretty much horrified as back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that things were going to be pretty much fucked for California, Nevada, Arizona, etc in less than a century unless some pretty drastic actions were implemented almost immediately. What increased my concern even further was that aside from the keynote speaker nearly every presenter and indeed the majority of the attendees at the session were from the Peoples Republic of China. They were clearly keenly interested in what tools could be brought to bear in order to establish smart water usage in ways that members of the U.S. were not.
Unfortunately problems like this take decades to develop and decades to solve and our 24 hour news cycle / 4 year political term world simply doesn't seem capable of functioning on that sort of timescale.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0510224444.htm
Nearly 10 years ago I attended a session at a conference on the usage of remote sensing (satellites) to monitor vegetation health on a daily basis and the resulting change in irrigation strategy. The conference session was sponsored and chaired by members of the Cotton Growers association and many of the papers presented focused on the gross disparity between water consumption and supply.
The introductory keynote speaker showed groundwater level changes over the past century focusing on the percentage change in aquifers that were 10s of thousands of years old and the sheer impossibility of ever recharging these aquifers even if the Colorado River was completely untapped. Many slides showed the telltale irrigation circles that everyone sees when flying over the western states and denoted how much water was being used by agriculture in general and the cotton industry in particular.
The following session papers covered a number of monitoring techniques using existing and planned sensing platforms both public and private to get near immediate feedback on plant health and adjust how much water was pumped into the fields as a result. The main takeaway from several of the papers presented was that both over and under watering was a serious concern for the cotton growers as both conditions adversely effected the total yield of the crop, but that over watering was a HUGE issue for overall water policy as the population in the region continued to climb and the demand for more vegetables and crops continued to increase.
I eavesdropped on conversations among the few Cotton Growers Association people present between presentations and the overall consensus among those in attendance was that this all sounded really cool, but who would pay for the support structure necessary to conduct such monitoring? The growers had no money to foot that bill nor desire to pay taxes to support it, and even if the U.S. Govt took on the task for the greater good the growers would have no really good way to make use of the data. Apparently many of them had to schedule their irrigation with the various local water authorities so far in advance that they could barely make use of even rudimentary monitoring as it was.
I had only attended the session out of pure curiosity as I had no vested interest in any part of the discussion, but I left the room feeling pretty much horrified as back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that things were going to be pretty much fucked for California, Nevada, Arizona, etc in less than a century unless some pretty drastic actions were implemented almost immediately. What increased my concern even further was that aside from the keynote speaker nearly every presenter and indeed the majority of the attendees at the session were from the Peoples Republic of China. They were clearly keenly interested in what tools could be brought to bear in order to establish smart water usage in ways that members of the U.S. were not.
Unfortunately problems like this take decades to develop and decades to solve and our 24 hour news cycle / 4 year political term world simply doesn't seem capable of functioning on that sort of timescale.
