This week, from Circle of Blue, technology is offering answers to the ageless question:
Where is the water?
A new mapping tool from the U.S. federal government’s top Earth sciences agency aims to visualize the nations’s water resources with greater frequency and detail.
The map displays a nearly complete picture of water storage in the Lower 48 states. It’s updated daily, and shows water currently held in snowpack, soils, and shallow groundwater as compared to the long-term average. It also incorporates moisture trapped in the tree canopy and wetlands, but it does not include rivers, reservoirs, and deep groundwater.
Analysts say that the data informing the tool will be helpful in a range of applications, from forecasting droughts and floods to notifying farmers when to fertilize crops so that the nutrients do not pollute rivers.
A recent glance at the map showed very high saturation in the upper Missouri and Mississippi river basins. Parts of the region just experienced the wettest 12-month period on record, with historic flooding that inundated towns and prevented farmers from planting corn and soybeans on nearly 16 million acres. If wet conditions remain in place, the region could be on alert for another round of flooding this spring.
Mindi Dalton is the coordinator for the USGS Water Availability and Use Science Program. She says that the tool is the first of three mapping products that the U.S. Geological Survey is rolling out in the next two years. It’s part of the agency’s mission to improve understanding of the nation’s water. Staff are now working on similar tools for daily water quality and use.
Water data analysts are excited by the prospect of more timely information. Peter Colohan is the executive director of the Internet of Water, a data project based at Duke University. He told Circle of Blue “This is a novel and hugely useful development. In our world, we’re thrilled with every new data set because there are so many questions and unanswered questions.”
The USGS tool answers the question of quantity. It ranks natural water storage from very high (exceeding 90 percent of past observations) to very low (in the bottom 10 percent of observations). But besides storage, there are other considerations. When she took her current coordinator job, in 2018, Dalton sought to integrate water assessments for quantity, quality, and use that had been operating somewhat independently. Each factor influences the other: for example, heavily polluted water has more limited value.
It’s this integration of data that excites Colohan, who previously worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. When researchers can combine and manipulate multiple data sets, it opens the door to new products and services. Colohan said that there are numerous potential applications for a daily water storage assessment. Nutrients from farm fields are a substantial water pollution challenge. Fertilizers applied to saturated fields can be more easily washed away by rain. The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture designed an online tool that tells farmers when to spread manure in order to minimize runoff. Combining water storage data with weather forecasts can indicate whether nutrients are likely to remain on the field.
Those sorts of applications are possible only when the data is open. Dalton said the numbers underlying the USGS mapping tool are publicly available, but not easily accessible. She said that future updates of the map will include a search function. Users will be able to click on an area of interest and download the data for that watershed.
And that’s What’s Up With Water from Circle of Blue, which depends on your support for independent water news and analysis. Please visit
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