What’s the Matter with Earth? The Climate Can Tell

This year’s Climate and Society class is out in the field (or lab or office) completing a summer internship or thesis. They’ll be documenting their experiences one blog post at a time. Read on to see what they’re up to.

Moyang Feng, C+S ’18

Just like people get fevers, global climate change is making the Earth unhealthy. Doctors can diagnose diseases using modern medical technology. Fortunately, climate scientists can do the same. By collecting climate data, analyzing them, and, scientists can get a sense of how sick the planet is and provide advice on actions we can take to protect it.

This summer, I’m working in the Utah Climate Center at Utah State University. It’s located in the Cache Valley, which itself is part of the Great Basin, one of the driest places in North America. The planetary sickness scientists are working on diagnosing and treating here is severe drought caused by the reduction of precipitation and increase of mean temperature. In particular, they’re looking at groundwater and agricultural outputs for possible clues.

When I got here, I was told that local residents have been complaining about a lack of rain. My coworkers have also spoken a lot about drought.

Precipitation in the Great Basin region is rare during the spring and summer. That means surface water resources are put under heavy strain due to agricultural production, and pumping groundwater is the only effective way for agriculture to thrive here. 

Therefore, understanding changes in groundwater levels—which could be related to precipitation change—is crucial for making water management decisions. That’s been the focus of my internship. I’m mainly concerned with groundwater storage in the Great Basin and how the groundwater changes can provide an indication of drought.

Diagnosing Symptoms

People face all different kinds of diseases, such as the fever. Doctors often use a thermometer to get a more accurate sense of the how severe a patient’s fever is and how it changes over time. For drought, we can measure how severe it is by analyzing the groundwater depletion in different time series. Groundwater data is available from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for approximately 1.9 million sites across the country, with tens of thousands of wells’ data measured at different timescales.

The normal level of human body temperature ranges from 97°F to 99°F. Anything above that is a fever. Similarly, it is found the groundwater level from 2014 to 2017 is lower than the average level, it could indicate a drought occurred. Usually the lower the groundwater level, the more severe drought is.

Causes of Sickness

Low precipitation can reduce the groundwater recharge rates and further produce drought. Higher temperatures can also play in a role by drying out soil and plants, something that happened in the Cache Valley in the summer of 2013.

In addition, there’s only one reservoir in Cache Valley County, and it doesn’t contain enough water for agricultural irrigation. That’s led people to keep pumping groundwater at a faster pace, all while the rate of groundwater replenishment has been much lower than the rate of pumping. Thus, human activity has become a very important factor in intensifying drought.

Treatments

Patients generally follow the advice of their doctors. In the case of the planet, after we have identified the causes of groundwater depletion, we can help the patient follow the doctor’s orders with our water management decisions.

There are already some actions made by the relevant organizations such as the Utah Division of Water Resources. Water managers there have discussed pumping water back to the aquifer and building two more reservoirs. The state government has also tried to educate citizens on the importance of groundwater depletion and how could it relates to our daily lives in an effort improve public awareness.

Although my work only concerns the sickness at a regional scale, I believe that this case can definitely be a model for diagnosing drought globally, especially in areas with less precipitation that rely on groundwater. Thankfully, we have data analysis methods and data monitoring system for both climate and groundwater. We can use them to identify drought and analyze the causes of it. We already know what out of control groundwater pumping can do to aquifers, and if we do not set up the corresponding treatments, even the most experienced scientists will not be able to stave off the worst impacts of drought.

Therefore, let us work as part of our daily lives to protect the water resources for our beautiful planet.