THIRSTY

California Needs 11T Gallons of Water

To recover from drought.

According to NASA, it will take 11 trillion gallons of water to repair the damage California has suffered during its three-year drought. That amount of water is 1.5 times what the largest reservoir in the United States can hold. NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites collected the data. “Spaceborne and airborne measurements of Earth’s changing shape, surface height and gravity field now allow us to measure and analyze key features of droughts better than ever before, including determining precisely when they begin and end and what their magnitude is at any moment in time,” said Jay Famiglietti, who leads the team of scientists. With these measurements, they determined that the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins lost 11 trillion gallons of water from normal levels.