PIA18816: NASA's GRACE Sees a Drying California
 Target Name:  Earth
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  GRACE
 Spacecraft:  GRACE Satellite
 Instrument:  K-Band Ranging System 
 Product Size:  1280 x 755 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  University of California 
Irvine 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA18816.tif (2.9 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA18816.jpg (141.3 kB)

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This trio of images depicts satellite observations of declining water storage in California as seen by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites in June 2002 (left), June 2008 (center) and June 2014 (right). Colors progressing from green to orange to red represent greater accumulated water loss between April 2002 and June 2014.

California's Sacramento and San Joaquin River basins, including the Central Valley, have suffered the greatest losses, in part due to increased groundwater pumping to support agricultural production. Between 2011 and 2014, the combined river basins have lost 4 trillion gallons (15 cubic kilometers, or 12 million acre-feet) of water each year, an amount far greater than California's 38 million residents use in cities and homes annually.

A version of the June 2014 panel (right) appears on the Sept. 26, 2014 cover of Science Magazine. Image after Famiglietti and Rodell, 2013, and Famiglietti et al., 2011.

GRACE is a collaborative endeavor involving the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas, Austin; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; the German Space Agency and Germany's National Research Center for Geosciences, Potsdam.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of California, Irvine

Image Addition Date:
2014-10-01