America's water: Agricultural water demands and the response of groundwater

Ho, Michelle; Parthasarathy, VA; Etienne, E.; Russo, T. A.; Devineni, Naresh; Lall, Upmanu

doi:10.1002/2016gl069797

Cited by 19 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…The increasing demand for biofuels and changes in the commodity market have created a new era in the U.S. agricultural sector (Lark et al, ), particularly for corn and soybeans. This expansion of agriculture into most of the U.S. river basins (Ho et al, ) increased the irrigation water consumption in 2015. The total water withdrawal for the agricultural irrigation was 2% higher in 2015 compared to 2010, which accounts for 42% of total fresh water consumed.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Water Security Assessment for the Contiguous United States Using Water Footprint Concepts

Veettil

Mishra

2020

Geophysical Research Letters

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Water security is tightly connected with the food security, ecological health, and economic prosperity of a region. In this study, a comprehensive water security assessment based on water footprint concepts from 1995 to 2015 was performed for the counties located in the Contiguous States of the Unites States. The availability of blue water (e.g., surface water) is comparatively less in the western river basins, and most of the rainfed agricultural lands in the eastern United States were characterized by the lower levels of green water (e.g., root zone soil moisture) storage. This integrated assessment of the water security indicators can directly map the critical regions and reveal the dependence between human water consumption, crop water requirements and environmental flow. This analysis can be further extended to incorporate climate change and extreme drought events to inform specific locations (e.g., counties and watersheds) at which problems of water conflict are more likely to occur.Plain Language Summary The spatial and temporal changes in climate variables (e.g., precipitation and temperature) control the water supply within a river basin. Concurrently, variability in sectorial water demands is determined by agricultural and human usage within a river basin. Therefore, it is important to integrate supply and demand components to investigate water security within a river basin. This study investigates the spatiotemporal variability of water security indicators such as blue water scarcity, green water scarcity, and Falkenmark Indicators across the major river basins of the continental United States. We provide a first-ever assessment of water security based on climate and demand-driven water availability based on the selected sectors for the 18 major river basins of the CONUS (Contiguous States of the Unites States). We believe that our findings will provide insight into water supply and demand and related water security components in the CONUS. The results of this analysis will be useful in developing regional water management programs as well as in identifying key vulnerable river basins in the CONUS.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Water Security Assessment for the Contiguous United States Using Water Footprint Concepts

Veettil

Mishra

2020

Geophysical Research Letters

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“…more surface runoff (Alaoui et al, 2018)), or a change in seasonal water demand over different times of year, allowing the system to recover when pressure on the hydrological system is low (i.e. wet season) (Ho et al, 2016). Additionally, it is important to note that the natural processes driving drought termination may be consistently great enough to compensate for a higher drought maximum intensity due to human activities.…”

Section: Drought Termination Ratementioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropogenic activities alter drought termination

Margariti

Rangecroft

Parry

et al. 2019

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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Despite the increasing influence of human activities on water resources in our current Anthropocene era, the impacts of these activities on the duration, rate and timing of the recovery of drought events, known as the drought termination phase, remain unknown. Here, we present the first assessment of how different human activities (i.e. water abstractions, reservoirs, water transfers) affect drought termination. Six case studies in Europe were used to analyse the human influence on streamflow drought termination characteristics. For all case studies, we compared the drought and drought termination characteristics derived from a human-influenced time series of streamflow (observation data) and a naturalised time series (modelled data) for the same period. Overall, results clearly demonstrate the influence of human activities on drought terminations in all the studied catchments. Groundwater abstractions, reservoirs and mixed influences were all found to increase the average duration of drought termination, whereas water transfers into the catchment decreased drought termination duration. Results also show that average drought termination rates increased in all case studies due to the human influence. Furthermore, start and end months of the termination phase were more skewed to certain months in human-influenced data than in the naturalised situation. Future research could extend this new knowledge by looking to add further case studies and covering different human activities to gain a wider understanding on how human actions modify hydrological droughts and their recovery. Furthering this work could also help to improve the forecasting of drought recovery in the Anthropocene, which is important for informing drought management decisions.

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“…The index developed and used in this study computes the maximum cumulative deficit over a growing season between daily water requirement for optimal crop growth and daily effective rainfall. Variants of this method have been presented in our previous studies for quantifying the water stress globally (Devineni et al, 2013(Devineni et al, , 2015Chen et al, 2014), and drought indexing for the United States (Etienne et al, 2016;Ho et al, 2016). Given an n-year record of daily data, our water stress index calculates the day-by-day accumulation of the deficit in rainfall in each of the n growing seasons.…”

Section: The Cumulative Deficit Index: Background and Scientific Basismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anomalously warm tropical eastern Pacific SSTs (El Niño) are associated with a drier-than-normal ISMR, whereas anomalously cool tropical eastern Pacific SSTs (La Niña) are associated with a wetterthan-normal ISMR (Sikka, 1980;Parthasarathy and Pant, 1985;Rasmusson and Carpenter, 1983). Ihara et al (2007) have suggested that the ENSO warm (cool) phases shift the location of the tropical Walker circulation and cause deficient (excessive) rainfall by suppressing (enhancing) the convection over India. Hence, ENSO indices were chosen to be among the candidate predictors for the forecast model.…”

Section: Climate Precursors and Climate Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Season-ahead forecasting of water storage and irrigation requirements – an application to the southwest monsoon in India

Ravindranath

Devineni

Lall

et al. 2018

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Water risk management is a ubiquitous challenge faced by stakeholders in the water or agricultural sector. We present a methodological framework for forecasting water storage requirements and present an application of this methodology to risk assessment in India. The application focused on forecasting crop water stress for potatoes grown during the monsoon season in the Satara district of Maharashtra. Pre-season large-scale climate predictors used to forecast water stress were selected based on an exhaustive search method that evaluates for highest ranked probability skill score and lowest root-mean-squared error in a leave-one-out cross-validation mode. Adaptive forecasts were made in the years 2001 to 2013 using the identified predictors and a non-parametric k-nearest neighbors approach. The accuracy of the adaptive forecasts (2001–2013) was judged based on directional concordance and contingency metrics such as hit/miss rate and false alarms. Based on these criteria, our forecasts were correct 9 out of 13 times, with two misses and two false alarms. The results of these drought forecasts were compared with precipitation forecasts from the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD). We assert that it is necessary to couple informative water stress indices with an effective forecasting methodology to maximize the utility of such indices, thereby optimizing water management decisions.

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America's water: Agricultural water demands and the response of groundwater

Cited by 19 publications

References 59 publications

Water Security Assessment for the Contiguous United States Using Water Footprint Concepts

Water Security Assessment for the Contiguous United States Using Water Footprint Concepts

Anthropogenic activities alter drought termination

Season-ahead forecasting of water storage and irrigation requirements – an application to the southwest monsoon in India

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