Finding the wet princes of Bel Air

Wet princes of Bel Air

In case you didn’t know, there’s a drought here in California so there are rules for when you can and can’t water your grass and plants. Not everyone adheres to those rules though. And some households really don’t follow the rules. In Los Angeles, or more specifically, Bel Air, there are a handful of households using millions of gallons per year. Michael Corey and Lance Williams for Reveal used satellite data to guess which ones.

I mainly share this though for the title of their post that explains how they did it: Now this is a story all about how we found the Wet Princes of Bel Air. Genius.

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Moving drought boundaries

Moving drought boundaries

Drought continues to trudge along. My grass is just about dead, save a few hearty patches clinging on to the last few drops in the soil. Sad state of affairs it is. Drought is not static though. The boundaries move and the levels change, which is what John Nelson mapped in an overlay of five years of drought in the United States, based on data from the Drought Monitor.

We’ve seen this as small multiples and animated maps, but I like how this static boundary version gifts a sense of shift without actually moving.

Grab the aggregated data here.

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Water scroller

Water scroll

Here's a nice scroller from Katie Park for the Washington Post. It shows dwindling water levels in major reservoirs in California. At its core, there's only a handful of data points to look at, but instead of a line to represent the top of a bar chart, Park used an animated water line that makes the numbers feel less abstract. I like it.

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Drought report cards for California water districts

Water Report Card

Thomas Suh Lauder for the Los Angeles Times provides you with a way to see how the water district near you is doing relative to the rest of the state. Look up a location. Get a report card.

It's still not looking good for California's drought situation. Lots of brown yards, parks with dying grass, and barren farm lands up for sale. It depends where you are though. For example, the park near where I live is almost completely brown, but in the city next to mine, the parks are oddly lush green.

Makes this local view all the more important.

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Growth of Las Vegas metro and skyline

Growing Vegas

Western cities are growing but water supplies are decreasing. That's not good. ProPublica, as part of their series Killing the Colorado, focuses on the fastest growing Western city: Las Vegas.

In 1971, the Las Vegas metro area was home to 262,000 people. Today, the population is approaching 2 million. Since 1990, its footprint has more than doubled. Managing urban growth is critical to the future of the West's previous — and declining — water supplies.

The interaction is slick. Drag the cursor back and forth in the timeline on the bottom to quickly scroll through time. The green shading shows the quickly increasing Las Vegas city limits. The illustrated skyline changes too, which is a nice touch that places the data in a more relatable context.

They probably could have stopped there, and the piece would've been good, but you can also change the map perspective with a click and drag.

Nice.

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Emptied reservoirs in California

Dried up reservoirs

Winter is over and it's shorts weather these days in California. This is good for relaxing outdoor lunches but not so good for the drought. It's sad to drive down the state and see a bunch of barren farm land. Victor Powell shows this shift in water supply through reservoir data from the California Department of Water Resources.

Each dot represents a reservoir, and the outer circle around each dot is reservoir's capacity. A time series chart appears when you select a reservoir so you can see the percentage of fill on a monthly basis. However, instead of showing the full time series with a single line, a line is drawn for each year so that (1) you can see seasonality and (2) overall fill percentage dropping.

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California water use per capita, by district

Water use by district

Matthew Bloch and Haeyoun Park for the New York Times mapped, for about 400 water districts, how much water Californians use per capita on a daily basis. In some areas, the daily average is over 500 gallons per capita. That's nuts.

Then again, I still can't get over that the state average is around 100 gallons per day. I just looked at last month's water bill, and my household is right around there. Is someone working on a home monitor that's easier to read than the bill that reports water use in cubic feet?

I'm pretty sure most people don't have a clue about how much water they use every day, and maybe if they did know they'd do something about it.

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Gallons of water to produce foods

Water to produce food

With all the talk recently about how much water it takes to grow almonds, Kyle Kim for the Los Angeles Times took a quick look at home many gallons of water it takes on average to produce other foods.

Although almonds isn't on the chart. Am I missing it?

Update: Pretty sure they're not on there, but here's some back-of-the-napkin math. The LA Times article quotes about one gallon of water per almond. According to the Google, the average almond weighs 1.2 grams, which translates to about 24 almonds per ounce. Therefore, 24 gallons of water per ounce, placing almonds between mangos and asparagus from a per ounce perspective. (Thanks, Kevin.)

In other news, I will be switching to a strict diet of carrots and beer in the interest of saving water for this state.

Update #2: Check out the original piece from the LA Times, which is interactive and lets you create a meal to see how much water was used to produce it. It's not almond-focused. (Thanks, Kyle.)

Plate of food

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Science Caturday: All Dried Out

tungcat

California has been experiencing drought conditions for over a year, and now geological monitoring stations  show that the drying ground is actually rising up. According to this article by Sarah Zielinski in Smithsonian Magazine, “Measurements of these subtle movements, made using GPS instruments, suggest that the western United States is missing some 62 trillion gallons of water, enough to cover the entire region six inches deep.” Alarming news for farmers and thirsty kitties alike.

 


Filed under: Science Caturday Tagged: California Drought, Drought, Sarah Zielinski, science lolcat, thirsty cat, weather lolcat

Mapping the spread of drought, nationally

Drought time series

Although California has perhaps had it the worst, drought also affects other states, mainly the southwestern ones. Mike Bostock and Kevin Quealy for the New York Times have been updating an animated map weekly. It shows the spread of drought severity, across the United States. But, be sure to scroll down to also see drought levels over time, shown as stacked area chart.

See also: NPR drought tracking from a couple of years ago.

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