Region: Tulare Lake
San Joaquin Valley – Tulare Lake
San Joaquin Valley – Kaweah
San Joaquin Valley – Pleasant Valley
San Joaquin Valley – Westside
San Joaquin Valley – Kings
New groundwater rules hurting ag land prices
From the Business Journal:
“Groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) in Tulare, Fresno, Kings and Kern counties have until 2020 to develop plans for long-term viability of their regions’ supplies. In other California counties where state officials deem the groundwater overdraft problem less critical, their GSAs will have until 2022 to finalize their plans.
Once those plans are done, the various groups will have 20 years to implement them, with a common goal of halting in their areas the overdraft of groundwater.
The law requiring these plans, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), already is having a big effect on prices for agricultural land, particularly in the areas from Madera County down to Kern county, where some of the most severe over drafting in the state commonly occurs. … “
ASU scientists use satellites to measure vital underground water resources
From Arizona State University:
The availability of water from underground aquifers is vital to the basic needs of more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, including those of us who live in the western United States. In recent decades, however, the overpumping of groundwater, combined with drought, has caused some aquifers to permanently lose essential storage capacity.
With the hope of providing water resource managers with better tools to help keep aquifers healthy, a team of scientists from Arizona State University and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are using the latest space technology to look underneath Earth’s surface to measure this precious natural resource.
They’ve focused their efforts on one of the world’s largest aquifer systems, located in California’s Central Valley, measuring both its groundwater volume and its storage capacity. The results of their most recent findings in this groundbreaking study have been recently published in Water Resources Research.
Click here to continue reading from Arizona State University.
Dry wells, sinking land and fears of a global food crisis
From E&E News:
The bottom is falling out of America’s most productive farmland.
Literally.
Swaths of the San Joaquin Valley have sunk 28 feet — nearly three stories — since the 1920s, and some areas have dropped almost 3 feet in the past two years.
Blame it on farmers’ relentless groundwater pumping. The plunder of California’s aquifers is a budding environmental catastrophe that scientists warn might spark a worldwide food crisis.
“This is not sustainable,” said Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “If those aquifers continue to be depleted and if we start running out of water in these big aquifer systems, the global food system is going into meltdown mode.”