Stanford University study uses satellite technology to document sinking in San Joaquin Valley and look for potential solutions
… [Matthew] Lees and senior researcher Rosemary Knight, Ph.D., from Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, … have some predictions for the future. In a newly released study, the Stanford team combines satellite data from multiple decades with readings from ground-based GPS stations. The result is a kind of three-dimensional map, pinpointing the areas most affected by the over-pumping of groundwater in the Central Valley and the rate they’re still sinking. … Levels have been continuing to drop as much as a foot in many of the years since 2006. But with those measurements, comes the beginning of a possible solution. When we first met Professor Knight several years ago, her team was pinging the valley floor with electromagnetic antennas suspended from a helicopter, mapping California’s underground aquafers and the soils that run through them. The goal: to identify super porous basins and farmland that could be flooded or pumped with diverted water to recharge the sinking aquifers. She says adding in the new precision mapping data could help do that, and more.
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