Where's the water, mate?

Sydney and other Australian cities could run dry by 2006.

By Janaki Kremmer : Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – In the town of Goulburn, three hours south of Sydney, nightly baths are a thing of the past. Dishes are allowed to pile up. Hoses no longer douse dirty cars and thirsty plants.
The 22,000 people in town haven't suddenly grown slovenly. A change in habits is being forced by a dry spell stretching back to the 1970s that is squeezing Australia.

To conserve, dishwashing is done in batches, plants are watered with runoff from showers, and cars are cleaned with gray water from washing machines.

Barring monsoon-like rains, such adjustments will need to happen on a massive scale if Australia's biggest cities - including Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, and Adelaide - hope to continue having drinking water in just two years' time, experts say.

"Too long we have been living like we might live in Europe and not in accordance with dry climate conditions," says Leigh Martin of the Total Environment Center in Sydney. "Most people who balk at reusing sewage water should be educated about recycling."

Australia is not only the driest inhabited continent on earth, but also the greatest consumer of water per capita, according to savewater.com.au. Australians use more than 260,000 gallons of fresh water per person per year, or 24,000 gigaliters - that's enough to fill Sydney harbor, 48 times over. About 70 percent goes to agricultural irrigation, 9 percent to other rural uses, 9 percent to industry, and 12 percent to domestic use.

The outlook is ominous: The Warragamba dam that supplies 80 percent of the water to Sydney and was last full in 1998, wavers around 39 percent, despite some good spring rain this year.

Not so long ago, the effects of drought were felt mostly by farmers and bush-dwellers, but now it has come to the backyards of city folk, emptying their swimming pools and drying up their roses.

The water manager in Goulburn says that his town may be out of water by August 2005. "Many gardens are dying, and this year only one public swimming pool will be opened using last year's water," says Matthew O'Rourke. He says that if push comes to shove, they may consider trucking water in from other towns.

Many cities in the country are now considering recycling on a large scale.

Perth is already moving to desalinate sea water, even though it would bring enormous environmental consequences. While desalination plants are not rain dependent and can be built quickly, they use large amounts of power and contribute significantly to greenhouse gases.

This is not good news for Australia, says Penny Whetto, an atmospheric scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, who says that with temperatures around the country expected to rise by 6 degrees Centigrade by 2070, something radical is required to control warming.

The water shortage may force changes in agriculture.

Experts believe that in 17 years the Murray River will be too salty to drink. The Murray is one of the country's foremost river systems, responsible, along with the Darling River, for irrigating 40 percent of the country's crops. The growing of European-style crops is one of the main reasons for the degradation of the fresh water, experts say. The large amounts of irrigation that run into the ground dissolve the salt below into runoff.

There are urgent plans to top up Sydney's dams from the Shoalhaven River via a new $195 million pipeline as part of the state government's plan to meet the city's water needs for the next 25 years. However this will depend on rainfall, and the pipeline is not going to be built until 2009. And environmentalists say taking water from the river could destroy sensitive ecosystems.

Other plans include pumping the deep water of the Avon and Warragamba dams. This will be finished by 2006 and is expected to boost drinking water by 5 percent.

One of the biggest issues, according to some researchers, is population growth.

In a 2002 essay, environmentalist Tim Flannery says that Australians could live sustainably today if the population totaled 8 million people (rather than the present 20 million). He is calling for tighter immigration controls.

But Paul Perkins, the chairman of the National Environment Education Council, says that if Australia does not take the thousands of immigrants who apply every year then someone else will, "and that will be Australia's loss."

"We have incredible land masses to be shared and that's what it all comes down to - sharing resources - just as Northern China has learned to live with much less water, so can we, and without reducing quality of life. And for this, a concerted national water initiative is required," says Mr. Perkins.

The federal government has announced that it will release $1.5 billion to help alleviate the growing problem.....

If Santa Barbara County does not receive significant rains this winter, we will officially declare drought emergency with attendant restrictions on use and volume. Our past investment in the Cal. water project will not help because the project is short on water already, so we will continue to pay the same for less or no supplemental supply. Hopefully the early rains in the more northern watersheds of California are harbingers of heavy winter snow pack capable of replenishing the many water projects.

Western Droughts Worse in Past
By Sarah Davidson
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 27 October, 2004
9:00 a.m. ET
A new atlas of climate history over the past 2,000 years shows the western United States has experienced more pronounced droughts in the past than those of recent memory.

Drought costs the country $6 billion to $8 billion annually, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In arid regions, any increase in temperature can lead to longer and more frequent droughts, the study revealed.

To gain a better understanding of how human activities and natural changes alter climate and weather patterns, scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University’s Earth Institute looked to the past. Researchers compiled the North American Drought History Atlas after analyzing 20,000 tree ring samples to understand the moisture record for the past 2005 years.

"It is not yet possible to forecast droughts, but we can surmise a great deal from the paleoclimatic record about the future possibilities of droughts," said Edward Cook, the project leader.

"The Western United States is so vulnerable to drought, we thought it was important to understand some of the long-term causes of drought in North America," Cook said.

The lack of water in the West over the past four years "pales in comparison with some of the earlier droughts we see from the tree-ring record," said David Meko, a University of Arizona researcher who also worked on the project. "What would really put a stress on society is decade-long drought."

Higher temperatures are directly linked to less rain, at least in arid environments, the study found. This means climate warming, however it occurs, could force continued or more severe western drought, the scientists conclude in a paper in the journal Science.

Researchers hope the picture provided by the Drought Atlas will help them improve climate forecasts. The atlas can be found at the site below.

Failure of monsoon effects might well be caused of cooler waters in the North Pacific (and deepening and lengthening of the high-pressure ridge over western N.Am.)

As to your question, yeah, we seem to be in a drought cycle (for several years now). And unseasonally hot weather (stretches of 40C/105F days) with no respite. Nationally, dams and reservoirs are at an all time low and locally, locust plagues are wreaking havoc with crops in biblical proportions and actually destroying vehicles (overheating blocked radiators). Not a pleasant time for anyone, city or country.

On a personal note, I have to sit and watch my vege patches self-dessicate...only have collected roof water and not much of that...have lost most of this year's expected food crops that I eat and sell....I do have a very large dam, but it's as dry as a bone....useless without rainfall!

I won't bore you with links to scientifically irrefutable evidence of my anicdotal story....just take my word for it...YES, WE ARE VERY DRY!

Here's looking for lightning, thunder and rain...

Regards,

Shax

Just maybe [if this forecast is correct] you will get 75mm of rain??

Regards,

Shax

Hopefully the rains find you and yours soon.

Cheers-

posted: 11 January, 2005
9:45 a.m. ET
The amount of land ravaged by droughts has more than doubled over the last 30 years, and the key factor, according to a recent analysis, appears to be the rise in global temperatures.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) studied the widespread drying trends in Europe, Asia, Canada, western and southern Africa, and eastern Australia. They found that the fraction of the Earth experiencing very dry conditions rose from about 10-15 percent in the early 1970s to about 30 percent in 2002.

The researchers claim that almost half of this drastic change is due to global warming as opposed to a decrease in rainfall or snowfall. In fact, the average global precipitation has increased slightly over the past few decades.

"Global climate models predict increased drying over most land areas during their warm season, as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases increase," said Aiguo Dai, lead author. "Our analyses suggest that this drying may have already begun."

Warmer temperatures cause more evaporation – drying out certain areas, while drenching others in rain and snow. Evidence of the latter is the United States, which has become wetter overall –especially between the Rocky Mountains and Mississippi River – over the last 50 years, says Dai. Other parts of the world showing a moistening trend include Argentina and parts of western Australia.

"Droughts and floods are extreme climate events that are likely to change more rapidly than the average climate," Dai said. "Because they are among the world's costliest natural disasters and affect a very large number of people each year, it is important to monitor them and perhaps predict their variability."

Dai will present the new findings on Jan. 12 at the American Meteorological Society's annual meeting in San Diego. The work also appears in the December issue of the Journal of Hydrometeorology.

This sounds like Pat [pnbrown]ese to me.

grey water?...........lots of variables there

water barrels?.....I do collect rain water for house plants. .....not because of drought. .....Wayne who has had about 10 inches of precipitation so far this year.