NASA’s Jay Famiglietti urges acceleration of programs to save water. Snowpacks in California mountains near record lows during drought. He says public have not been involved in discussions about the problem.
California will run out of water in 12 months, according to a NASA scientist.
The state only has one year of supply left in its reservoirs due to persistent drought and is also running out of backup groundwater, Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote.
The drought means that total water storage in California, which has been in decline since 2002, has been sapped by the need to use the resource for farming, he said in the Los Angeles Times.
Since 2011 the state has been losing 12million acre-feet of water per year and the total amount of water in snow, rivers, groundwater and reservoirs was 34million acre-feet below normal in 2014.
Famiglietti suggested immediate water-rationing measures, which are being considered in southern California, across the state.
The use of groundwater for farming in the Central Valley has caused land to sink by one foot a year.
Sprinklers and other landscaping accounts for 70 per cent of urban water use, according to the Sacramento Bee.
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