My favorite statistic is that 24.5 trillion gallons of water is 75 million acre-feet, or slightly more water than all California agriculture uses in 2 years.
That's common for water allotment and agriculture. Western water rights allow for users to take only a limited number of acre-feet of water per year. If there is less water, then some people get bumped off the list for that year.
I'm not a farmer but I would guess it's serious. Land area is measured in acres, and the amount of water that crops need per growing cycle could be measured in feet, hence acre-feet.
An acre-foot is the amount of water required to cover a one acre area in one foot of water, or about 1.2 million liters.
1 acre covered in 1 foot of water. Makes sense where farmland is measured in acres, and actually probably a bit easier to visualize than "10^6L"-- though I know what you mean.
It's serious, probably because reservoirs and inundated lands are conveniently measured in acres of area, and depths of water in feet.
For water resources and agricultural uses, it's (given that you are using US Customary units for length and land area to start with) a reasonably sensible unit.
By my math, if that were a single spherical water droplet, it would be almost 3.7 miles in diameter.
If you have trouble visualizing this (as I do), the height of the Empire State Building is 0.2 miles. So imagine a sphere of water 20 times taller than the Empire State Building falling on New York.
Of course, the area and rate it falls on is crucial, but as a way to think about the scale of it I found this useful.
Edit: just saw this was done nicely by the article dreamcompiler linked to!
To make at least a dent in Houston's problems, it would have to be able to move 10 trillion gallons in a few days. But, hey, let's give it all year, just to make it easier. That's 27 billion gallons a day, just over a billion gallons an hour, 19 million gallons a minute, or 317,000 gallons a second. That's... improbable. That's 508,000 cubic feet per second.
Assuming a velocity of 1000 miles per hour, or 1467 feet per second (also improbable), you'd need a cross section of 346 square feet. That's a pipe that is 21 feet in diameter, which is not completely impossible. Or four pipes that are each 10.5 feet in diameter. That's doable. The 1000 miles per hour pumping speed is a bit of an obstacle, though...
California has only 20 million acre feet of reservoir capacity, which is currently filled to 125% of typical levels. The last thing that state needs is another 75 million acre feet of water.
California has very roughly a billion acre-feet of groundwater capacity[0], and it is so severely depleted from being pumped out to cope with surface-water shortfalls over the years that the Central Valley is sinking (and eroding groundwater capacity in the process.)
California doesn't need 75 million more acre-feet of surface water, but it could probably benefit from multiples of that being pumped back into the ground.
You jest, but there are serious (abstract) proposals[2][1] to build inter-regional water banking mechanisms, such as pumping water from flood years in the Missouri/Mississippi watershed to be stored in CA/NV aquifers, and vice versa. It's not a bad idea.
These are rather viewpoint-based articles. As a thought experiment, test their cause-and-effect explanations against the historical floods that Houston has experienced since it was originated by the Allen brothers. Houston had terrible floods even in the 1920's and 30's. There was very little concrete and pavement in those days, especially in the areas they claim are lost prairie.
Nothing in that article demonstrates that the flooding was made any worse by any of the claimed mal-administration. The only demonstrable difference these days is that very heavy rainfall events are more frequent, and more severe. Which does not support the hypothesis.
Edited to add: I will grant that there is more damage, because there are more structures now. Also that many of the structures built in the last decade or so a infill in flood-prone areas. So that's a good candidate for mal-administration. But the theory that the actual floods are worse, in terms of area flooded, flood depth, etc., is not supported IMO without better science. Could be true. But what we know for sure is it's raining more.
As they say: Is that a lot? I hate the way headlines measure things in useless units, just to get a bigger exponent. Why didn't they say it was 19000 trillion teaspoons? That's just as easy -- i.e. impossible -- to visualize. I think a possibly easier-to-visualize description is enough water to cover the whole state of Texas six inches deep.
The take away is that there aren't likely to be technological remedies to the affects of climate change. Once the earths defense systems are triggered we simply die.
> Once the earths defense systems are triggered we simply die.
Citation/clarification needed. Does your 'we' mean 'all of us'?
To be clear, there are very few people who have been alarmed for as many years as I have been about climate change. And my alarm only deepens over the years.
It's hard for me to imagine a reasonable way that humans will become extinct. I can imagine billions of us passing away.
How is that a takeaway? The article didn't even mention climate change (and it's impossible to definitively attribute a single event to climate change.
How is a big wet storm a "defense mechanism"? Why would the earth even have active "defense" mechanisms? What it is it defending?
It doesn't seem like a very effective defense mechanism, so far reports are that there were only 20 - 30 confirmed deaths due to the floods out of 6 million in the metro area. While tragic in the real sense, more people than that must die of natural causes in the Houston area every day.
There are ~500 cities with population over one million, so I think we are going to be seeing a 500-year disaster hit a million-plus city about once a year.
Sampling a timeseries is not like sampling an ensemble. But nonetheless I agree we will probably see many more large-scale climate events than we have.
That's it! We need a new unit of volume to replace gallons. A gallon is way too small. A barrel is difficult to understand. If only we had something standard like swimming pool or something...
24.5 trillion gallons of water is a huge problem... and also a huge resource. It's just in the wrong place, right? What if we had a system for rerouting water dumps like this around the country and could send it to a drought region?
We have interstate highways. How about interstate drainage?
Fyi...there are no basements in Houston (or Texas really) despite what the article states about how water will have to be pumped out of all the basements.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 98.1 ms ] threadhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
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Will be targeting the English market
An acre-foot is the amount of water required to cover a one acre area in one foot of water, or about 1.2 million liters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre-foot
For water resources and agricultural uses, it's (given that you are using US Customary units for length and land area to start with) a reasonably sensible unit.
If you have trouble visualizing this (as I do), the height of the Empire State Building is 0.2 miles. So imagine a sphere of water 20 times taller than the Empire State Building falling on New York.
Of course, the area and rate it falls on is crucial, but as a way to think about the scale of it I found this useful.
Edit: just saw this was done nicely by the article dreamcompiler linked to!
Assuming a velocity of 1000 miles per hour, or 1467 feet per second (also improbable), you'd need a cross section of 346 square feet. That's a pipe that is 21 feet in diameter, which is not completely impossible. Or four pipes that are each 10.5 feet in diameter. That's doable. The 1000 miles per hour pumping speed is a bit of an obstacle, though...
California doesn't need 75 million more acre-feet of surface water, but it could probably benefit from multiples of that being pumped back into the ground.
[0] CA Dept of Water Resources estimates between 850 million and 1.3 billion, http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/recharge/
[1] http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/the-water-czar-who-reshaped-c...
[2] https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/exit-interview-mulroy-tal...
This Guardian article was written 2 months ago:
“Where the built environment is a main force exacerbating the impacts of urban flooding, Houston is number one and it’s not even close.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/texas-fl...
A more recent Atlantic article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/why-c...
http://www.npr.org/2017/08/27/546603361/houstons-explosive-g...
Edited to add: I will grant that there is more damage, because there are more structures now. Also that many of the structures built in the last decade or so a infill in flood-prone areas. So that's a good candidate for mal-administration. But the theory that the actual floods are worse, in terms of area flooded, flood depth, etc., is not supported IMO without better science. Could be true. But what we know for sure is it's raining more.
They included several other visualization descriptions in the article. They can't put it all in the headline.
Citation/clarification needed. Does your 'we' mean 'all of us'?
To be clear, there are very few people who have been alarmed for as many years as I have been about climate change. And my alarm only deepens over the years.
It's hard for me to imagine a reasonable way that humans will become extinct. I can imagine billions of us passing away.
How is a big wet storm a "defense mechanism"? Why would the earth even have active "defense" mechanisms? What it is it defending?
It doesn't seem like a very effective defense mechanism, so far reports are that there were only 20 - 30 confirmed deaths due to the floods out of 6 million in the metro area. While tragic in the real sense, more people than that must die of natural causes in the Houston area every day.
So 1 with 14 zeros after. A cubic meter is 1,000 litres. So we are talking 100 billion cubic meters. Or the same as 100 cubic km.
Or the same amount of water as in a deep square lake which is 10 times 10 km wide and 1 km deep.
Or a square lake which is almost 32 km on each side and 100 meters deep.
Or a shallow square lake which is 1 meter deep and roughly 317 km on each side.
We have interstate highways. How about interstate drainage?
Well, I guess that's what rivers are....