California would need at least 11 trillion gallons of water to end their current drought according to a team of NASA scientists. The statement was made on Tuesday at the American Geophyiscal Union meeting held in San Francisco.
The team came to such conclusion after they completed the airborne project to calculate waters necessary to end the dry spell. It also marked the first time airborne measurements were made as analyses "would be impossible using only ground-based observations."
In a report by NBC News, NASA scientists undertook the project to estimate the water deficit using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, also called GRACE. The experiment was conducted in the San Joaquin and Sacramento river basins as both provide the most water source for the state.
In fact, the two have been losing water volume by around 4 trillion gallons a year since 2011, according to The Verge. The rate is alarming as it goes beyond the volume used by California residents annually.
NASA research showed that Southwest United States groundwater levels are below the average and "are in the lowest 2 to 10 percent since 1949," quoted The Verge. This presumably affected the decrease in volume of groundwater found in California's Central Valley, which led to the current drought.
Recent numbers released by the U.S. Drought Monitor last Thursday showed that 99.7% of California state is in a dry period, according to USA Today.
In another research, NASA discovered that snowpack in the Sierra Nevada range is now half of its previous levels measured for 2014, noted NBC News. The agency's Airborne Snow Observatory made the calculation.
Principal investigator for the Observatory Tom Painter noted that numbers from the snowpack was "one of the three lowest on record and worst since 1977, when California's population was half what is now," NBC News quotes a NASA release. The drastic changes will directly affect the capacity of the state's reservoir to replenish faster.
While the state experienced much-awaited storms in the past days, the amount of water is still not enough to solve the drought problem. Scientist Jay Famiglietti of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said, "It takes years to get into a drought of this severity, and it will likely take many more big storms, and years, to crawl out of it," quoted USA Today.
Chairman of the State Water Resources Control Board Felicia Marcus called for the state residents and establishments to be conscious with their water use. "Recent rains are no reason to let up on our conservation efforts," NBC News quoted.
