Quantifying the Consumptive Landscape in the Potomac Watershed Upstream From Washington DC
Abstract
Some of the largest and fastest-growing eastern cities depend upon Appalachian headwaters for their fresh water. Today's relative abundance of water may be at risk: changes in climate and land use could alter the availability of surface water and human consumption could increase to meet the needs of a growing population and economy. Neither the supply of surface water nor the various withdrawals that support our population, irrigation, energy, and industry are distributed uniformly throughout our watersheds. This study correlates surface water withdrawals, consumptive use coefficients, and land-use/land-cover datasets to create a model for quantifying anthropogenic water consumption. The model suggests a method for downscaling and redistributing USGS county-level surface water withdrawals to 30 meter cells. Initially completed for the Potomac River watershed upstream from Washington DC's public supply intake, this approach could easily scale regionally or nationally. When combined with runoff estimates over the same landscape, the net-production or net-consumption of an area of interest may be calculated at high resolution. By better understanding the spatial relationship between hydrologic supply and demand, we can seek to improve the efficiency and security of our water resources.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMGC31F..08K
- Keywords:
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- 1626 Global climate models;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1637 Regional climate change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGE