Water Adaptation Techniques Atlas - Part Two
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Scientists at the USDA Southwest Climate Hub and California Climate Hub have developed the Water Adaptation Techniques Atlas to address water scarcity in the Southwest U.S. Research Scientist Noah Silber-Coats hopes farmers, ranchers and water managers can glean ideas to help them adapt to a changing climate and its impacts.
Silber-Coats… “If we think about what is a solution to water scarcity, right? There's an imbalance between when water is needed: the demand, and what's available: the supply. So we are looking at just about anything that is going to lessen that gap for a specific time, for a specific place for a specific water user. So a lot of those are about, how do we conserve water? And then we have things that are about supply, right? What about reusing wastewater? What about desalination? Even things that strike some people as like sci-fi, like cloud seeding, right? Which there are a number of active cloud seeding programs throughout the southwest. What are alternative crops that, that farmers could grow that use less water? What do we know about different irrigation technologies or tools for deciding when to irrigate so that you're matching the crop water needs to when you're applying water?”
The atlas includes over 200 case studies across Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.
