Groundwater Doctrine and Water Withdrawals in the United States
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Groundwater Doctrine and Water Withdrawals in the United States Sadia A. Jame 1,2
& Laura C. Bowling
3
Received: 10 November 2019 / Accepted: 28 July 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Groundwater is a valuable natural resource which is directly related to food production, human and ecosystem health. In the US, 48% of irrigated agriculture relies on groundwater, but there is no systematic national program responsible for groundwater management. For this paper, each US state was classified based on its most prevalent groundwater doctrine: Absolute Ownership, Prior Appropriation, Reasonable Use, and Correlative Rights. The Köppen climate zone of each state, USGS runoff data and USGS county-level water use data from 1985 to 2015 were used to analyze how groundwater use varies with climate and groundwater doctrine. Semi-arid states, which all follow Prior Appropriation doctrine, have the highest average irrigation rate, while states following Reasonable Use doctrine have the lowest average rate, but the largest variability. Analysis of Covariance shows that in Prior Appropriation states, irrigation volume and area do not increase during warm, dry periods but in Absolute Ownership states irrigation volume does increase. Water use trend analysis shows that irrigated area and groundwater withdrawals have increased over the last 30 years in humid and temperate regions, while irrigated area has decreased in semi-arid regions. At the same time, irrigation rate and the fraction of irrigation coming from groundwater has increased everywhere, suggesting a potential shift in the preferred water source for irrigation. This data analysis will provide insights for future work on how water policy should respond to water scarcity in US. Keywords Groundwater doctrines . Groundwater withdrawals . Irrigation rate . Irrigated area
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-02002642-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Sadia A. Jame [email protected]
1
Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
2
Ecological Sciences and Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
3
Department of Agronomy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
Jame S.A., Bowling L.C.
1 Introduction Irrigation is responsible for the second-largest volume of water withdrawals in the United States (US), after thermoelectric power production, and has played a substantial role in the growth and expansion of the US economy (Sloggett 1974; Hrozencik 2019). Agricultural production in the US can be divided into two regions based on water availability. Much of the Western US, west of about 100o W, is not able to produce crops without irrigation due to inadequate annual precipitation (Krajick 2018). In particular, 74% of total irrigated land and 81% of total irrigation withdrawals are in the 17 western states (Dieter et al. 2018). However, irrigation is not only limited to th
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