A recent study co-authored by two Northern Arizona University researchers showed that targeted efforts to increase water efficiency could save enough water annually to fill Lake Mead. It could happen without significantly compromising economic production, jobs or tax revenue.
The study, published today in Environmental Research Letters, demonstrates that there is no one right answer to… Read more
Depletion of river flow across the US during summer months. The 17 western states experience much higher levels of depletion during July to September than eastern states, owing to lesser precipitation and greater use of irrigation in the western states. a, Summer depletion during the 2001–2015 model simulation. b, Summer depletion in the driest… Read more
Over the past three years, Ben Ruddell, associate professor of NAU’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS), has led a team of multi-institution engineers and data scientists in developing FEWSION, a data fusion project that maps the food, energy and water supply chains for every community in the United States. The maps are based on an… Read more
Experts estimate that snowmelt accounts for as much as 75 percent of water supplies in the western United States. As the climate warms, however, it’s not hard to imagine a future when declining snowpack on western mountain ranges means less snowmelt. Scientists and water managers have already seen worrying changes in the timing and amount of runoff from season to season.
These… Read more
As collaborators on one of the first coordinated ecology research projects to study what happens to streams as they dry across the United States, Northern Arizona University researchers Ben Ruddell and Abe Springer will develop an improved smartphone application for mapping wet and dry reaches of streams.
Based on lessons learned from phone apps developed to map the desert springs of… Read more
While the full impacts of Hurricane Harvey on the Texas Gulf Coast are not yet known, severe flooding and evacuations are gripping the Houston Metropolitan Area—a region that has suffered three 500-year floods in the last three years.
In addition to being an important hub for food supplies, Houston is at the heart of the nation’s energy supply. As the fifth most populous… Read more