Groundwater makes up 30 to 50 percent of California’s water supply, but until recently there were few restrictions placed on its retrieval. Then in 2014 California became the last Western state to require regulation of its groundwater. With deadlines starting this year, for the first time water managers in the nation’s premier agricultural region – the…
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Ecologist Heidi Steltzer, a Fort Lewis College professor and member of the Department of Energy’s Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (SFA) project led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, studies how reduced snowpack and earlier snowmelt caused by climate change impact water supply in high-mountain areas. She is a lead author of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.
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Peter Nico has co-authored a new working paper outlining how groundwater management activities can affect not only the quantity but also the quality of groundwater with a team of water-quality experts led by the Environmental Defense Fund. Nico is an environmental biogeochemist and program domain lead for Berkeley Lab’s Resilient Energy, Water and Infrastructure Program. …
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Drilling a single oil or natural gas well with hydraulic fracturing requires between 1.5 to 16 million gallons of water. When the well starts flowing, the fluid that is brought back to the surface alongside the oil and gas is a combination of the injection fluid and brine from aquifers – a difficult-to-treat mixture known as…
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As world population grows, so do concerns that water availability and water quality will continue to diminish. Changes in land use, climate change, and extreme weather exacerbate these concerns, which threaten not only our fresh water supply but also systems that rely on watershed exports, such as hydropower and agriculture. Although watersheds are recognized as…
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Growing up in Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa, Tadewos Getachew witnessed firsthand the lack of access to clean drinking water. He closely watched the city grapple with infrastructure challenges related to treating waste water or fixing leakages in the water distribution system. Getachew realized that he wanted to develop engineering solutions. “I wanted to build a…
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Berkeley Lab scientists (from left) Deborah Agarwal, Juliane Mueller, Reetik Sahu, Bhavna Arora, and Charuleka Varadharajan are developing a computational tool for smarter groundwater management. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab) The overpumping of groundwater in California has led to near environmental catastrophe in some areas – land is sinking, seawater is intruding, and groundwater storage capacity…
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A recent workshop held at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science focused on how to apply hydrologic transport data skills to real-world hydrologic problems. Zexuan Xu, an EESA postdoctoral fellow, coordinated the May event, “Critical Timescales of Hydrologic Transport.” Zexuan is currently working as part of a team of researchers studying ecosystem changes in a…
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Soil harbors three times as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere, but until recently research into how warming affects the amount of carbon released from soil into the atmosphere was limited to investigations of the top meter of soil. Researchers at Berkeley Lab are the first to examine soils and sediments as deep as seven…
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Scientists who study the exchange of chemicals in rivers and streams examine activity taking place within the nutrient-rich portions of streambeds, floodplains, and riverbanks known as hyporheic zones – which provide habitat for various aquatic organisms. Berkeley Lab researchers investigating hyporheic exchange have now shown that meanders near the headwaters of the Colorado…
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