 Okay, wonderful. Thank you to everybody. We had a very engaging and informative morning session, so we'll jump into the afternoon. Something's honking. So we have an out. We're actually you're going to get a break this afternoon. Okay, so you will get a chance to get up stretch and we have to. We're talking groundwater depletion with quantity and quality. We got to half hour talks here. I think the way we did it last time worked reasonably well. If each speaker focus charges about 25 minutes, and we have a few couple questions about each talk, and then ask when we're done, we should have a good half hour or so. For Q&A before we take a break at three. So maybe at that maybe after we'll have both both panelists come and sit together and have a is that a good way to do it. Yeah, let's let's shoot for that. So, Jay, I will wave at you at about when this about five minutes left. To say hello or to get off the stage. So, you know, if you notice that, if you notice that picture that was up in the last slide, I was, I was smiling. And that's because we just moved from Southern California and been there for like 20 years and 10 years before that at University of Texas where things were quite warm and so some of you know we moved to Canada last summer. And so I just want to go through the evolution of our wardrobe. So the date on that is August 15. And that's the moving truck so we're moving in. So, yeah, grass is green. And let's see, then this is the last day of summer. This is September 21. Okay. And you know then the, then the, you know, season progressed and we went to AGU and then right after AGU. Here we are. Okay, and you can see look at you can see the snow out the window in the back there in fact. Yeah, we're smiling. Yeah, you can't see because we're under the face the neoprene face mask, which you know are part of the part of the wardrobe. Anyway, it's been it's been great up there. So, actually, this is not that I meant to take this slide. I hope I gave you the right slides because this isn't supposed to be there. But let me see what will I know we'll skip that because I'm not going to talk about that stuff. Wow, did I keep you the wrong presentation it's entirely possible hold on. This would not be the first time they've done I think I gave you the wrong presentation. Now we can adjust on the fly let's just do that. Okay, okay. So, while you look at these pictures of me and my wife. I'm going to tell you that really most of what we are talking about that I'll be talking about today is groundwater depletion as viewed from space. You know what I should can we just take like five minutes to get their right slide out. Yeah, we have time. Let's do that. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, we can. We can adjust. Is there anybody who hasn't done it would be the but it would be the question that wouldn't wouldn't be me. Okay, take two. Okay, so listen, last time I did this we did that I've done it once before that I can remember is these the wrong slides and have to change with that a Chapman conference in Hawaii actually had to go back to my hotel room and come back into it. But I thought the talk went swimmingly after that. See, we'll see how we do here. Talking to you more stories of the prairies while Carl is getting that, getting that loaded up. It's taking time you're going to see those pictures again. Let's see we tried little booths you see the dog there we tried little boots for the dog all varieties of little boots for the dog because we're talking about minus minus 40 C and minus 40 Fahrenheit yes. Just freezes there. No, no, it's just, you know, we're happy when we got there and the smile just froze into into position. We left it behind. Yeah, we had to sell the cars and buy all wheel drives and yeah, you know, engine blocking your cars have to have engine block heaters and I forgot all about winter tires. So you buy the car and you have to buy the tires and you have to store the tires and Yes, yeah, yeah, it's about there but it's about half the earth but six and six. Yeah, I'm running out of material Carly. How are we doing. Okay, I don't speak Canadian. No. And I never really when I said you know we love living in Austin but no I'll never say y'all. You'll never hear me say it. And well I'll never say a only is it not even really a joke. It just doesn't work. Right. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's been This is the right one. Definitely the right one. All y'all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there's the my favorite is the double y'all with like y'all gets y'all some food. Right. All right. Okay, so back to the presentation. Okay, so there we are. Yes, wonderful. Okay, so a lot of what I'm going to tell you about is the work that we've done with the grace mission. And I think many of you know about grace but for those of you who don't call the gravity recovering climate experiment. The first phase flew from 2002 to 2017 kind of a novel satellite mission in that it functioned more like okay now it's not now it's not working. Now we're just frozen. There we go. Yeah. I'm capable of doing this with no slides too. So worse comes to us we can do that. Okay, so the missions configured like like this the satellites are up at 400 kilometers roughly separated by about 200 kilometers and you know they're not they're not very big they're about the size of you put four of these tables together. That's about the size of the of the satellite you can see that you can see that here. And so it's a little bit unique in the sense that it really functions more like a scale and the way that works is as these two satellites they follow each other around in this tandem orbit they go over the poles. And as they fly over a place that gained water mass say because of a lot of snow in the appellations or something. That region gained water mass and so it exerts a slightly greater gravitational tug on the satellites pulls them down separates them a little bit pulls them down just a little bit towards the surface and likewise when they fly over a place that has lost water mass like you know drought in the western United States or groundwater depletion from the big aquifers. Then those regions have lost water rate. And so they have things are slightly less of a gravitational tug on the satellites and they float a little bit higher inter satellite distance changes a little bit. So really what the mission does is measure the position of the satellites there's like the position of the actual scale moving up and down in response to more water mass less water mass so you can see the ups and downs on a monthly basis but you can also analyze the long term trends and that's information that we didn't have before. So it's been kind of fun we were just talking at lunch and it's been kind of fun to just think about what these new data are telling us. They tell us one thing they tell us is the change not the absolute amount so we can't we need to pull a bunch of other measurements to understand how much water is on the ground or underground. But they tell us the change the delta S and in the total all of the snow and the surface water and the soil moisture in the groundwater together so if we want to pull out the groundwater. We use simple algebraic methods to do it but there's maybe perhaps I've oversimplified that but it's possible and I'll show you some examples. And so it's not like the be all and end all of remote sensing in that the time scales are course and the spatial scales are course so we're talking about monthly and longer time scale and large areas 150,000 square kilometers and greater. So it's a challenge so what it has been great for is informing. Policy makers the public doing research on big picture hydrology has been more of a challenge to bring this down to the scale at which water management decisions are made and of course for that we really need all the information we can get on the ground. And this is complimentary. I will show you a slide on some work that we're doing now and trying to get it to higher resolution. And it's fairly accurate. In the sense that we say it's a one and a half centimeter equivalent water height accuracy, meaning that the change in the storage over this big area 150,000 square kilometers or greater have to be a centimeter and a half. Okay to perturb that's a big the, the, the mass change has to be to affect the satellite. So if you're in the desert, that's a big number and if you're in the Amazon, it's a tiny, it's a tiny number. So that mission was decommissioned at the end of 2017 and then the follow on mission just launched in 2018. And I had the good fortune to be there was very close at Vandenberg and very moving because for me, you know, I spent much of my career, right from the start, before the mission was launched in about 1995 started. In 2006 started working with the grace science team and pre launch and now continue to work with the follow on but the whole mission, a lot of the results we have really sort of fit into a sort of a sweet spot in in my career that allowed us to see some things that I'll share with you today. And also think about how to act on them, which I haven't quite figured out. Let's take a look at some of what we have have found. So one of the most important things I think maybe for this presentation is a trend map that looks like this and this is taken out of a global picture so we'll look at the global picture in just a minute. So what we're looking at here is changing total water storage, all of the water storage change and so I mean all of snow surface water soil moisture groundwater could be in reservoirs could be in rivers wherever it's all the water. Blue is gaining. And red is losing. And this is from us the whole grace time period 2002 2006 and so these are the trends. And so when we look at the United States, we see that the upper half is getting wetter. And the lower half is, is getting drier. Okay. And that's pretty much west to east. The big hot spots in the US for losing water the central or aquifers right a big food producing region so the Central Valley in the Ogallala we heard about parts of parts of the story this morning. And those are certainly huge signals and they're some of the biggest signals for groundwater depletion in the world, about 60% of what we're looking at this is changing total about 60% of what we're looking at because we've done studies in these various spots is his groundwater storage change. The blue spot here actually goes up into Canada. So this is, you know, sort of indicative of the changing extreme. So we're starting to see the increasing flooding in the upper Missouri River basin and Calgary and Alberta show up in these data. We've done some studies looking at how we can use these data in and I don't have us here today but so Matt Rodel has been using this in the US drought monitor. And we wrote a paper a few years ago about on the flood side which doesn't really get as much attention with the grace research but how to use it to improve flood potential prediction not flood prediction but the potential for flooding, giving their regional, given the regional brightness of the of the landscape. So these are what some of the time series look like so this you know the background map is the trend map and so here we're looking at the ups and downs or in California and each one of those dots is a month. So we're looking at wet season dry season wet season dry season, sort of the first phase of the drought, second phase of the drought in recent years so 2006 to 2010 2011 to 2016 and then, you know, we might be over here somewhere but the long term picture is one of service, stepping, stepping down, mainly as a groundwater disappears. I won't talk as much about the high plains aquifer today but john mentioned something about what like 50 years to 50% and you know Dave Heidman has been writing papers saying that you know the water will be gone and he's a Michigan State water will be gone in 30 years so that's it that's a regional decision right there they're heading in that in that direction. So this is a huge concern. You know if we go back and look at this map, one of the things that I don't have enough an opportunity to say is that you know there's good news and bad news here. And so the good news is the United States is a big country. And like you were saying about Texas, you know it's a big state and so we've got some wet places and some dry places we've got some aquifers and you know say the same thing about California. So we have the opportunity to sort of work together. We don't do that within a state. We don't do that within the country. But when you look at this map, it's obviously a national water problem. Okay. And when we think about food and how places like the high plains and and the Texas Panhandle and Eastern New Mexico and and the Central Valley and California grow food for the nation using water that is just local water. This is a problem because that water is disappearing. So there's a food issue. I'm also on the Ag Board. By the way, some on the parallel, some been a board and agricultural natural resources. And so, you know, we need to be thinking about, are we going to be moving water to our major food producing regions in the United States? Are we going to be redistributing agriculture? Right. So this is what this is what these data suggests. You heard John talk about managed depletion. You probably will never hear Max say that. Right. He's smiling. But that's exactly what's happening. And his bosses will at least admit that to me in private that sustainability is a bit of a misnomer. Right. So this is what this is what's happening. Okay. So there's some of the time series. Communicating this to the public is important. This is supposed to be moving. Let's see if it actually moves. Yeah. So this is an animation. So, you know, getting the message out using visuals like this, you know, we're just going to look at the colors change and time series here on the right and the corresponding animation on the left. And so we're going to watch it get more and more red as we go into the first phase of the drought. Then we're going to start to get a little recovery and the colors get more blue. Right. Now we go to the really big bad drought of 2010 to 2016 and gets practically black. Right. And then a little bit of recovery. And this is sort of when we stopped. That's when we made that when we made that animation. And so those sorts of graphics, I think are super you were talking about media before these sorts of things that a huge impact in California. So we have a time slice that that's taken out of this animation of sort of beginning, middle and green, yellow, red, like traffic signal that really made the rounds in California had a pretty big impact. So how do we get to groundwater from a time series like this? This is the California time series. Really, it's the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Tulare Basin time series of total water storage change. So how do we extract from this groundwater? Grace is telling us this that the change in total water storage is equal to the change in snow surface water soil moisture groundwater. So Grace is telling us the change in this total basin here. If we want to. This is the algebra part. If we want to solve for groundwater, then we can just rearrange the equation. We need to get these data from other places. Right. Grace gives us this. And if we want to isolate the blue part, the change in the groundwater, then we need to remove, right, subtract that from the equation, remove, think of it as sort of removing the mass change signal. We need data. And what data we use depends on where we are. And if we're in California, we have lots of ground based data, right, we can use snow measurements, we can use reservoir data. We don't really do a great job measuring soil moisture yet. So we tend to rely on models. If we're someplace where we're not going to easily get our hands on data like Syria, we'll rely more on models and other satellites. Within NASA we're thinking about, sorry, wait a minute. Perhaps I left yet another slide. Okay. I did have a slide. Maybe I removed it that will look at how we can do a lot of this from remote sensing thinking about other new snow missions. And so Jared and I were just talking about the snow, the future of snow, our remote sensing over lunch, surface water. Hopefully we'll come from the SWAT mission, the surface water and ocean topography mission. Soil moisture already measuring with the Soil Moisture Active Passive Mission and the French Smoss Mission. So there's hope to be doing more of this large scale work from space. Okay. So how do we do this in California? We're looking at the Central Valley, the green part trying to get at what's happening groundwater there. Use snow desks, which is assimilated snow observations and a model from the Weather Service, surface water. We use measurements from the California Reservoirs, storage and reservoirs and Soil Moisture. Again, we use model Soil Moisture. And so we run through this and we get a time series that looks like this. And so, you know, looks like a bunch of gibberish, but really what it is is actually quite important because this represents an estimate of the change in groundwater storage from space over a large area that really isn't otherwise possible in a short time span. USGS does it, of course, takes a long time and a lot of manpower to do the very careful measurements that are required to really understand what's going on. This is more like we're going through with a snow plow. Okay. And we're kind of taking a first cut at what's going on. And so we see very distinctly the overall decreasing trend and the trends during the last two phases of drought. What is the light color? Uncertainty. Yeah, that's the uncertainty that comes from doing a water balance. And, you know, we have to account for the error in the grace and the error in the snow measurements. Right. Yes. Yeah. Right. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that's overly optimistic for sure. Biggest source of error is really in the Soil Moisture. Really? Because we don't measure it and we're relying on models. And so we do the standard thing of what's the standard deviation of the models and their large area models. And, you know, the models themselves could be terrible. So we readily admit that there's a long way to go. There's a long way to go here. But the big picture nonetheless is quite clear. Right. And so this is the long term cumulative groundwater loss that's been happening in the Central Valley going back to 1962. This is from based on Claudia Font's figure in the 2009 professional paper. So what are we looking at? Red is USGS data. The blues estimate that we just, should I just show you, tacked on to the end here. So our gray space estimate. Colors in the background. This is dark tan. It's drought. Super dry. Blue, wet. Right. Wetter than usual. And the light tans and blues that don't show up as well are moderately dry, moderately wet. So take home messages here. Long term decline of groundwater in the Central Valley. Right. This is the downward trend. The other message is that we get some recovering wet periods, but then we're going to offer a lot of depletion and some recovery and a lot of depletion. So the hope of the sustainable groundwater management act. So this is where sustainable becomes a little bit of a misnomer. There's really no way we're going to level off that trend ever. We'd have to stop producing food and do all kinds of managed recharge. Agriculture is a tremendous amount of water, but yet we need to eat. So I think the benefit, you know, one of the real benefits of the sustainable groundwater management act will be to slow that rate of depletion. So take that trend line from something like this to, of course, people that are listening can't see me move my arm up and down, but basically decrease the rate of disappearance, manage the rate of depletion. That will be agreed upon by a number of different groundwater sustainability agencies across the state. Good luck with that. Nice. Oh, here's that slide I was trying to share. So this is sort of the future. So we have the follow on now for grace. We're hoping for ASO is the airborne snow observatory, which is an airborne operation that's run by my colleague Tom Painter. He's left, but left it at JPL. So it has aircraft lidar measurements of snow and estimates no water equivalent, a very high resolution. Perhaps we'll get a snow remote sensing mission based on this concept or other concepts. SWAT I mentioned in SMAP is sort of the future for soil moisture and surface water and soil moisture remote sensing. Just an update on some new techniques. So, you know, when you look at our paper on India, which is one of the first big, you know, so the resolution of grace is very course. There's lots of room for improving it. This went into our proposal, how to improve things like the trend going from a blob like this in northwestern India to something with a lot more resolution in India and Pakistan. So we're going from basically the resolution of an blob is probably 150,000 square kilometers. And this is order of magnitude higher resolution. Same thing with the amplitude here. Looking in the Amazon by the amplitude, I mean the peak to peak peak to trough height on those times series. And the amplitude is important because bigger amplitude means stronger water cycle more in more out more flood more drought. I never realized that rhymed until right now. Subsidence huge deal. Here's Joe Poland famous USGS hydro geologists standing next to a telephone pole in the middle of the Central Valley in 1977 with the previous ground heights marked on the telephone pole. Okay, so that's about 50 feet and 50 years. These are some slides from Tom for who's at JPL looking at this region in the box. Groundwater subsidence like, you know, many of you know what it is. It's kind of like deflation of a tire. When you let the air out of a tire, it flattens out when you take the water of some aquifers and some aquatards because of the mineralogy the flat clay minerals that are in some of those aquifers they tend to flatten out. They have to be aquifers that have clay minerals or aquatards. So here's some radar data from Tom from 2007 through 2011. Looking around this Merced region and so we've got eight to 10 you know up to about a foot per year. Then in a real real bad part of the drought the last phase of 2011 to 2015 we're up to foot and a half per year. Up dead I got from Tom the colors have shifted but now we're up to meter per year. Now we're sort of looking south of that. There's that region we were looking at. And now we're up to a meter per year. So this is this is ongoing. So this is an issue. So there's Joe and 77 and I photoshopped him to go to 2015. Right. This is the problem. And it's happening over the United States. This is from another USGS report. So all these blue areas are places where subsidence has been been detected. Colorado River Basin is a place where you know we don't talk a lot about groundwater unless we're talking about Arizona. And this is a problem because groundwater itself is really really important to to the water security of the western US and certainly to the lower Colorado River Basin. And because you know if there's less total water availability then there's less opportunity to actually meet the demands. Right. Of the of the basin state. So this is the paper we did back in 2014. Here's the grace signal for the total water storage change. So wet season dry season seasonal variations but a trend. We want to look at where that trend was coming from and how much of it was groundwater versus how much is surface water. Because when we talk about the Colorado River Basin we always talk about the river and Lake Mead and we never talk about the groundwater. So we wanted to see what was happening. And that's down here. And get to the punchline. Here's Lake Paolo Lake Mead. Biggest reservoirs in the United States shown in red in this time period. You know when you know we know that they're dropping but they're actually not dropping as much as the groundwater which is largely unmanaged. And which is disappearing at a rate of about six to one conservatively. Okay. So we're managing the groundwater managing the surface water groundwater is quietly disappearing. It's a global issue. Here's the global map. So here's the ice sheets melting. There's the glaciers melting away. Here's some climate change high latitude and low latitude increases mid latitude drying. Here's some intranural variations dropped in there. This is all on the paper that's published last year at this time. And here's the here's the aquifers are just just through on their clips. So these are our mid latitude aquifers that are all being depleted. And we can map those to an aquifer template which we did in the paper in 2015 and show that over half of the work says not just not just us over half the world's major aquifers are being rapidly depleted. Here's some of the time series. Just a couple of things to think about this was supposed to be not sure I'm going to be able to show you what I want to that was supposed to be an animation. Okay. So, you know, we move a lot of water around in California. Right. And we're starting to talk about doing it in Saskatchewan. Actually, I'm going to a meeting on Monday. I'm going to show these slides. I'm going to bring them up a little bit and make sure I deliver the right presentation because the guy who's in charge of the meeting has served the equivalent of our vice president. So I'll try to clean up Mac. So we move a lot of water around in California principally through the state projects which are shown in red and the federal projects which are shown in yellow. And there's allocations and you know, maybe Max is the guy who comes up with the number. I don't actually know. Okay. What I've shown in this big year, the black line is that groundwater time series that we calculated before the red and blue lines are the allocations in the state and federal water projects how much surface water is available. And that says a percent of some total number. And so those numbers during wet periods are higher 80% 90% 100% during a drought be cut back on surface water allocations right 50% 40 right down here is some of the projects were zero right the Central Valley project zero allocation. So this just gets the issue of are we really kidding we're kind of kidding ourselves when we manage one and not the other we manage surface water and not groundwater because all that happens here is that when surface water is not available. We use groundwater. Okay, and in this case the depletion right the relationship between using more groundwater and having less surface water available is one to one. This is not rocket science but I think it's an important graphic and it really speaks to the need for combined surface and groundwater management. Let's finish up with this slide. Because it speaks to the the renegotiation of the Colorado River basin allocation the drought contingency plan. And so Arizona sort of at the end of the water rights. And within Arizona, the farmers are at the end of the line. Okay, and so what's happening is in Arizona is that if and when the drought contingency plan kicks in, then Arizona will lose a lot of water. And specifically the farmers will lose a lot of water already been agreed that the farmers can use groundwater in fact they're being subsidized to to drill more wells. The story showed you that the groundwater is disappearing. Now I just wanted to sort of juxtapose that with my experience in Phoenix when you go to Phoenix you will hear the Chamber of Commerce say Phoenix is open for certain from Phoenix here. Phoenix is open for business. Yeah. Sorry, buddy. You know, Phoenix is open for business we have plenty of water and yes, right the city. I think if you're going to build some new development or something you need to show 100 years of water availability. But that was before the drought contingency plan and now the future over reliance on groundwater. So when the farmers so Phoenix will say we have about 300 years of groundwater left before the drought contingency plan kicked in and gave farmers and are subsidizing farmers to use more groundwater and use it without management. Yep. Okay. So my point is, maybe it's not maybe now Phoenix only has 200 years or 150 years of groundwater left. And in a city like Phoenix, the disappearance of groundwater is the disappearance of the city. So these decisions are being made and we're not even aware of it. So we need to really understand what's happening around us. Okay, so it's good place for me to stop. Thank you. Let's take one or two. We'll just push into that. So we got two questions here. So first and then day. Hi, you should know me by now Ingrid Padilla. Can you distinguish between freshwater and salt water in coastal systems? No, no, no, we're just seeing a mass change. And the real work of unraveling to that's the real work is unraveling the signal. So we would need a lot of extra data. You mentioned innovation transfer in California with the large scale sensing you're able to do. Can you in your group quantify the impacts of innovation? What are transfer? Probably, but that would be modeling. That's a modeling scenario. And so there are lots of groups who could do that. And we're doing some of it right these days. In the Saskatchewan River Basin, but it's great for the two groups to interact. So you can sort of see what's happening and use that as sort of initial conditions for modeling. Have you ever done a full scan of the earth and compared the box that is terrestrial water with the box that is terrestrial water? And do they match? Yes, they do. And so my university colleagues will appreciate that there are some papers that you write and you've been trying to publish for years and years and years, and they may never get published. So this is one, but let me show you what happens with hand motion. So what happens with the land is that it does this. What happens with the ocean is that it's out of face. So when water moves from the land, it goes to the ocean. When it moves from the ocean, it goes back to the land. So they match each other perfectly. But we can see the trends of basically the land storage going down as the ice melts and the ocean storage going up because of sea level rise. Someday that paper will be published. I promise, but I can't predict when. I've been predicting it for 10 years. That's great. We're going to stop now, but we're going to have time for more discussion afterwards. So I just want to be sure we have time for our next presentation. And so we were ground water quality is our next topic. I'll give you the opportunity to speak with you. I'll do a little introduction so you know where I'm coming from. I started out as a groundwater modeler and in fact, the Central Valley hydrologic model that Jay referred to. I wrote that proposal as a project manager for that. They've also worked in California on a program called the groundwater ambient monitoring assessment program. That was a very generous sponsorship by the California water boards of $50 million to evaluate the quality of California's groundwater. I'm proud of the fact that we finished that project under budget and ahead of schedule. Today I'll speak to you in my capacity as the national water quality assessment groundwater studies chief. We're undergoing a reorganization. I'm in the earth system processes division of the water mission area, but we like a lot of organizations have cross flow charts. So my primary job responsibilities are to look at our groundwater studies. Is it just this arrow here? I'll divide my presentation up into three parts. I'll give you a little bit of background. Then I'll show you some broad based results and then I'll focus on constituent specific results. When I spoke with the staff before here, they asked me what keeps me up at night and the answer is red wine. But my goal is to keep you up at night with some of our findings. The natural water quality assessment program was the outgrowth of a set of questions and some funding provided by the United States Congress. What is the condition of the nation's streams, rivers and groundwater? How are these conditions changing over time? How do natural factors and human activities affect these conditions? And where are those effects most pronounced? We're operating in streams, we're looking at aquatic ecosystems, we're looking at groundwater. A little bit of historical perspective so you have some sense of where we have been and what we're up to. NOC operates on decadal scales. The first decade was 1991 to 2001. The primary organizational unit was the study unit. They were 51. There's no accident that there's one in each state. The USGS is not political but they were the senators are. And the goal of those study units was to provide a baseline survey of water quality conditions. From 2002 to 2012, the focus was to produce a set of synthesis reports on major water quality topics of national priority. We're now in our third decade. It was scheduled to go from 2013 to 2022. It will be sunset in 2021. Sandy spoke to you about our new work programs. The work being conducted by NOC when the funding that was going toward NOC will be incorporated into these new work programs. I can speak faster because I'm from New York. So please do slow me down. Groundwater is an important source of water supply in the United States. And you'll notice I add a little subtitle, a drinking water perspective. 45% of the US drinking supply comes from groundwater. If we divide that up, the shallower depth zones are used primarily for domestic supply. About 40 million people depend on groundwater for their domestic supply. And those wells are typically drilled at depths of 50 to 150 feet. Public supply wells provide water for about 100 million people. The depth zone for public supply is about 150 to 750 feet. Those slices are an attempt to be proportional. So we're going to focus on groundwater as a drinking supply. Principal aquifers provide a framework for that assessment. In cycle one, decade one, the survey effort was focused on those study units, which are largely large watersheds. During cycle two, we made the transition. In decade three, we're focusing on principal aquifers. The USGS has mapped 62 principal aquifers in the United States, 57 of which are in the Conterminous US. If you take a closer look, 20 principal aquifers account for 90% of the pumping for public supply and 85% of the pumping for domestic supply. Two of those are located entirely in California, the Central Valley and California Coastal Basins. Those basins got covered as part of that groundwater ambient monitoring assessment program. So at least 18 principal aquifers for us to evaluate. And we are well on our way to completing that. NAWQA has three types of studies that has been engaged in over the past 20 plus years. There's a set of networks called land use studies. They're typically observation wells. They're typically drilled to depths of 20 to 50 feet. Where you see those green dots, those are wells drilled in agricultural areas, where you see those red dots in urban areas. We've been measuring water quality in those wells once every 10 years, so we're now into the third set of measurements. You'll notice that those studies are highly targeted. They're designed to ask the question, what is the effect of a specific land use on water quality? And trying to get to the shallowest first encounter with the water table. Built around those are what are now called major aquifer studies. They're typically domestic wells, but not entirely. These wells are about 50 to 150 feet deep. They're also targeted. They're not distributed across the entire resource. In that first decade, we were in large watersheds. The study unit staff chose an area inside that watershed where domestic wells were an important source of water. They distributed those wells within that area, and they conducted their studies. The studies weren't really designed to get a whole picture for the US. However, they are distributed across a really wide range of climate and hydrogeologic conditions. Now that we're into our third decade, we have these principal aquifer studies. They're almost entirely public supply wells. They're typically deep, and they're distributed. The wells are distributed across an entire principal aquifer. It's not the only data sets that we have. We're sampling about 1,500 public supply wells. And the aqua has sampled something on the order of 4,000 monitoring domestic wells. Of those, roughly, oh, maybe 1,500 continue to be resampled. The U.S. Geological Survey has a set of water sign centers. Those water sign centers collaborate with local state agencies as part of the co-op program. All those data are assembled into our national water information system. So all those little dots you see there is a location of a well in this national water information system. They're about 85,000 wells. Not all of them have water quality data. Most of them don't have an extensive suite, as do the NAWQ wells. There's also another set of water quality data out there, the US EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System, CIDWIS. There are 225,000 wells in that data set. Not all of them have water quality data. We've made extensive use of the NWIS data. We're now beginning to make use of the CIDWIS data. That's the background. Now let's look at some broad-based results. These results are for our major aquifer studies from that first decade. Leslie D. Simone and others wrote a circular. What you see here is simply a look at all the wells as a snapshot. And I want to make the important point that that set of wells is a set of wells. They may or may not be representative of a larger resource, but it's still a nice indicator. 15% of those 2000 wells have an exceedence of a health-based threshold for a geologic-sourced material. 5% have an exceedence for a man-made. So just in the big picture, geologic sources are generating more concentrations above a health-based threshold than man-made. The top three geologically were manganese, arsenic, and radon. Not all trace elements, not all radiochemical constituents were sampled for all these wells. The man-made sources nitrate 4%. Pesticides and solvents are very rarely detected at high concentrations. It doesn't mean if you're living next to one, it's not a problem for you. It's not to say that a leaky tank isn't a problem for everybody. But leaky tanks are not everywhere over the landscape. Even nitrate is not everywhere on the landscape. Agriculture is not 100% of the landscape. California, a really important agricultural state, about 12% of the landscape is agricultural. So those are the results from our domestic wells. This is, I feel like, the commercial results at regional and PA scales can differ. Let's switch to these principal aqua surveys. We have sampled over 1,200 wells to date. We sample from more than 500 constituents in every one of those wells. 34 trace elements, major and minor ions, eight radioactive constituents, 90 VOCs. The 90 VOCs is the same as we did in the previous cycles if we sampled the VOCs at all. We're sampling for 227 pesticides and their degradates. Previously we were sampling, I think, for about 120. The increase in numbers largely looking for the degradates. Added to the cycle were 120 pharmaceuticals and hormones. I've got those slides after my presentation, should there be time. We also sample extensively for traces of ground water age. Tritium, helium, oven noble gases, carbon-14, SF6, CFCs. Every single well. It's a kind of data that's not otherwise available. So the surveys trying to add to that national data set, SIDWIS routinely collects for regulated constituents. People are not required to sample for age tracers. Of all those 500 constituents, 182 have a human health benchmark. Not all human health benchmarks are regulatory. Those are maximum contaminant levels. But there are health-based thresholds that can be used to provide context. So here's how we provide context. We take the environmental concentration, we put it in the numerator. We put the health-based threshold in a denominator and we get a ratio. If the concentration is greater than the benchmark, then that relative value is more than one. We'll call that a high value. If a value is greater than one-tenth of the benchmark and less than one, we'll call it moderate for organics. If it's less than half of the benchmark, if it's greater than one-half of the benchmark and less than one, we call it moderate for inorganics. We have different thresholds for organics and inorganics because organic constituents are added by people. People are really sensitive to the presence of pesticides and VOCs in their water. If you tell them that you have a little bit of manganese or a little bit of nitrate, it doesn't have the same effect. So we're giving the organic constituents an opportunity to present themselves in this approach. Proportion is really good because it is scale invariant. I can talk about what proportion of the state of New Jersey has high concentrations or what proportion of the state of Texas has high proportions. The precision of that estimate does not depend upon the size of the place. The precision of that estimate depends on the number of samples you obtain. We have routinely sampled for 60 wells distributed across the principal aquifer. If a constituent is present in 2% of the resource, we have a 90% chance of finding it. So we're not going to miss much. So let's take our preliminary results at the highest level. We're just going to take all the wells. We won't worry about how big those aquifers are. We won't worry about how much groundwater pumping comes from them, just at the well-reviewed scale. Inorganic constituents are present at high concentrations in roughly 25% of the well sampled. The low values are roughly half. The organics, I think there was one value that was high. In 1,300 wells distributed across the landscape. And you can see it's a very small sliver from moderate concentrations. So inorganic constituents are more prevalent at high concentrations than organic constituents. Let's break open those pie charts. What's nice about the pie charts is you can ask the question of a well, is this well high for inorganics? Yes or no. It's just a 1 or a 0. Assemble up the results. You can ask, is it high for trace elements? You can ask, is it high for arsenic? So when we break it out this way, trace elements in radioactivity are those constituents most prevalent at high concentrations on the order of 10 to 15%. I'll telegraph a little bit. The trace elements typically are in plastic aquifers. The radioactivity is typically high in carbonate aquifers, but not always the case. And then you look at nitrate, great cause of concern because of eutrophication. But at the depth zone used for public supply, nitrate concentrations are high in about 1% of these wells. VOCs and pesticides, one detection. If you look at a pesticide compound and you ask the question, what is the highest concentration that this pesticide was detected at? Put that in an enumerator, into the denominator, put the health base threshold. The typical number for these compounds is on the order of 0.001, of 1,1000. They're ubiquitously present, but they're ubiquitously present at very low concentrations relative to human health benchmarks. If you're a fish or an insect, it could be a different outcome. So that's a big picture. Let's look at what these constituents are. So this is the answer what keeps you up at night. These are illicit constituents that should be candidates. Radium 226 plus radium 228 is very rarely measured for. It's measured for when gross alpha dictates that they do so. In those 1,300 wells, it's a 5% exceedance rate. Arsenic 5%, manganese 4%, Strontium 3, radon 2, uranium 1, fluoride 1, nitrate 1. So taking nitrate as our benchmark, we know it's a concern. People are worried about it. Everything in this list above nitrate ought to be on your list also. And melibdom is not much below nitrate. And then that right hand column, all but nitrate are coming from rocks and minerals. At the risk of sounding silly, rocks and minerals are everywhere. The sources of nitrate are not. That's why we find naturally sourced contaminants to be the most prevalent. It's just that simple. I'll back up. I didn't put gross alpha and gross beta in this list. They are regulated constituents, but they are sort of, you know, bins for a number of components. So I didn't isolate those out. All that data is published in data series reports. From the date we sample a well to the time you see that report for about three years or so, maybe two if we're lucky. Accompanying those data reports are a set of fact sheets. Every one of these principal aquifers gets a nice fact sheet. The kinds of pie charts that you just saw are in these fact sheets. The map up in the right hand corner shows 15 of our principal aquifer surveys. 11 of those fact sheets are published. Four are just about published. And I'll walk you through those. And as a reminder, each one of those principal aquifers was devised into equal area cells. It's called stratified random sampling. It's not random sampling. And it's stratified because we're dividing the aquifer up into cells of equal area. That leads to a dispersed set of points. It would fail any test of randomness that would apply to it because it's dispersed. This provides a direct assessment of the resource. That set of wells is in fact a standing for the resource. So let's walk through this slowly. I'll put some boxes around some of these pie charts and then I'll add some. The ones shown in purple are carbonate aquifers. Let's start with the Ozarks. Less than 25% of the resource has high or moderate concentrations. So that's 75% low. We go to the Biscayne, about the same, although more moderate than Ozarks. The Florida is slightly more than a quarter. And then the Valley and Ridge, again, more. We often think of carbonates as being really vulnerable. Well, they are vulnerable where they're unconfined and there's been a lot of study of karst aquifers and therefore a lot of folks have the sense that all carbonate aquifers must have problems. Carbonate aquifers have problems in those areas where they're unconfined. But once they're confined, it's not nearly the same issue. Let's compare that to unconsolidated deposits. High plains and glacial, the high plains that blew north to south color. The glacial is the crosshatch across the northern tier of the country. Basin range fill largely but not entirely in Nevada. And then the Rio Grande Valley. In every one of those cases, the high plus moderate concentrations are more than half the resource. In each case, the high values are about a quarter of the resource. The unconsolidated deposit aquifers have a lower water quality than the carbonate aquifers do on the whole. So again, there's been a lot of folks on carbonate systems because of their variability. But there's sort of the big picture. Let's switch back to this picture of our carbonates. And now let's compare those carbonate aquifers to buried consolidated sands and sandstone aquifers systems. These systems are all pointing from the land surface out down beneath the ocean. So they're increasingly confined as you move from their outcrop towards the offshore. The Mississippi embayment and Texas coastal uplands are shown in yellow. The US Geological Survey separates the Mississippi embayment from the Texas coastal uplands. But it's a state boundary. So when we hear about those aquifers being in the states, it's partly by definition. If it's in Texas, it is an aquifer. I was just getting my dig in. I apologize. And what we can see there is that the water quality is about the same as the Ozarks. The coastal lowlands shown in that pink-purple color, it's about the same as the Florida. North Atlantic coastal plains shown in the mustard color, the southeastern coastal plains shown in that maroon red color. The water quality is comparable to somewhere between the Biscayne and the Florida. Highly confined systems generally are protected from the overlying landscape, much less prone to sufficient contamination. And because of the nature of the lithologies, they're not that prone in most cases to the geologic constituents as well. There's the Canberra Ordovician, which we'll focus on next. Half the resource has high concentrations. So we're going to go now from the broad base to the constituent space. This slide has a lot of information on it. I took it out of publication by one of my colleagues. I'll add a set of squares so that way you can walk through it slowly with me. The Canberra Ordovician system is a buried system. It sits in the northern Midwest. We have 60 public supply wells, one well per cell. Those are the stratified randomized sampling design that we use. Then we also have 20 additional public supply wells that were targeted to areas with high gross alf activity. This is a collaboration with the Minnesota Department of Health and others. Those understanding wells are shown with circles drawn around them. Now, you'll see there's an area of gray and there's an area of white on that map. That area of gray is where the Makroketa Shale sits above the Canberra Ordovician and where it's white, that shale is absent. So we have the shale overlying the Canberra Ordovician aquifer in part and absent in part. Let's look at the mean groundwater age. So we have extensive age sampling. So it's going to be the shapes of those symbols. Where you see a circle, you have groundwater that's less than 10,000 years old. So the National Water Model is interested in time scales from days to a couple of months. We're operating here. The young groundwater is less than 10,000 years old. If you look at those triangles, that's groundwater more than 100,000 years old. And in fact, some of those wells, the groundwater is more than a million years old. Some of the oldest groundwater that we've actually ever dated. So that is the mean groundwater age. And you'll notice that the older groundwater tends to be beneath that shale, the younger groundwater tends to be northeast of that shale. Now, finally, with that background information, let's take a look at concentrations. The gray fills shapes are concentrations that are one-half of the benchmark. The green values are between one-half and the benchmark, and those red-brown colors are above the benchmark. If you look, you'll see there's a lot of red in that gray area. There's a lot of gray in that white area. Let's summarize that here. The upper pie chart shows what proportion of all the samples in that on-confined region have high concentrations, moderate and low. One-quarter is high, two-thirds is low. If we look at the pie chart where the macrochita shale is present, more than half of those samples have high concentrations for Radian 226 plus 228. Water flow is generally from northwest to southeast. As the water moves along that flow path, particularly as it moves beneath the shale, we get increased mineralization and increasingly reduced conditions. Radium 226 is sorbed under iron hydroxide coatings under oxide conditions. As that water begins to get reduced as the salinity goes up, then we get mobilization due to decreased sorption capacity and increased competitive exchange. The Radian 226 is simply being released to the aqua system under those conditions. If Radium doesn't have you worried, I'll try to worry you with potentially corrosive groundwater. The geological survey was approached going back now about five years or four years, wanting to know whether or not there was any information on lead. We don't have a lot of lead because we sample water before it enters the home. We sample it at the well-ed. Lead, when it's present in household water, is typically present because it's leached from the household components. Or in the case of large utilities, it could be from the mains delivering water to homes. We had 27,000 wells in our NWES dataset where we could compute the Langular Saturation Index, which is essentially a carbonate calcite saturation index, and the chloride to sulfite mass ratio. The Langular Saturation Index is a calcite saturation index. It's sort of a proxy for any carbonate precipitate. The chloride to sulfite mass ratio is important because when it's high and you have lead, and you have lead in contact with other metals, you can get corrosion. So we computed the LSI and the chloride to sulfite mass ratio at each one of those 27,000 locations, classified it out, and then looked at the prevalence of corrosive values on a statewide basis. Those states that are colored in darker orange are states where half the wells have corrosive groundwater. The ones coded in the lighter orange color, I think it was like a quarter to half, the green less so, and then the lightest color still less so. Eight million people live in states where most of the groundwater is corrosive or potentially corrosive. So if there's lead in the piping, if there's lead in the fixtures, if there's lead solder at those copper fittings, then there's that potential. There are 16 million people living in those lighter orange colored states. This to me is always a cause for more work as needed. Clearly people ought to be getting their homes tested in those states. The green states and the lighter green colors doesn't mean people are free. They're still corrosive groundwater, but it's not as prevalent. Well, the LSI is not a particularly satisfying value used because it doesn't directly speak to lead. Brian Jurgens and others put together a paper. We published in the S&T. We repeated our exercise for 8,000 supply wells from our NWIS dataset, and we geochemically speciated, rather using a code, we speciated, and we titrated lead into the solution geochemically, or I should say numerically, until precipitates formed, and those color codes reflect how much lead that water would absorb before the first instance of the precipitate. And those reds in the greens are the places where a lot of lead is added to the water. Perfect. Just about done. So you can see that those greens in reds correspond reasonably closely. Manganese has a secondary maximum contaminant level of 50. It has a health-paying screening level of 300. These show 44,000 wells in our NWIS dataset. Everything in gray is less than 300. Everything colored is more than 300. 13% of our samples have manganese greater than 300. I'll just kind of cut to the punchline. When you look at the conditions under which manganese is high and you ask how many people depend on supply wells in those areas, you've got 2.6 million people. I'll skip over uranium in just a time. Let's talk about nitrate, something that I was told people very much care about here. Shown on this map are the centroids of our networks, our land-use networks, and our major aquifer survey networks. Our land-use networks are shallow wells. The circles are agricultural. The squares are urban. The triangles are major aquifers, largely domestic wells. Let's look at the colors. Where the color is clear, it means there were no exceedances at all in that network. Where you see yellows, it means that there were detections and less than 20% of the wells in that network had a high value. Where you see red, it means that 20% or more of the wells in that network had high values. So this is Neil Dubrovsky's attempt to take measurements of thousands of wells and cascade them up. So let's just try to pull this together into a summary. The agricultural wells shown in circles, 40% of the agricultural networks are characterized by the fact that 20% of the wells have high values for nitrates. So if you're in a shallow monitoring well in an agricultural area, 20% or more of the wells are high 40% of the time. Go to the other end, there's largely domestic wells. 5% of all those networks have maybe one to two wells of a high nitrate concentration. I threw this slide in, so I'll use the last minute for this. I've heard a lot about machine learning. We are using machine learning fairly extensively. As part of our inaugural program, we have four intensively studied principal aquifers, Central Valley, Glacial, North Atlantic Coastal Plain, the Sipian Baymen. These show the outcomes of two machine learning models that we've built. The one in brown is nitrate, and those nitrate predictions are fully 3D. And it's the concentration of nitrate in a voxel, we'll call it. So the darkest browns are more than 10, the lightest color less than two. The model predictors include dissolved oxygen, manganese, groundwater age, and other predictors. Up left-hand corner are groundwater ages. Those come out of that Central Valley hydrologic model that you saw referenced before. So we're taking the simulation model results, we're feeding it to machine learning code. The dissolved oxygen probability map, manganese is a redox indicator also. Those are determined using the same machine learning methods. We take the data, we trend machine learning models, fill those voxels with redox conditions, feed those results to the nitrate. In addition to doing these synoptic surveys, we're also tracking trends. We have a website, where you see an upward arrow, you see a statistically significant change in the network, where you see a black square, no statistical significance to the values, where you see a green, a statistically significant downward trend, where you see the large arrows, the change is more than 0.5 milligrams per liter at the medium level. So there are relatively small changes over a 10-year period. I think I've finished just one time. So a couple of questions, and then we'll have both members of the panel go up for the following ending discussion, if that's okay. So I've got John, and then Nusha. Oh, I'm sorry, David and then Nusha. And then after that, we'll go to the full panel. How about waiting for the panel? All right. Who did I say first? Yes, John. On your prior slide, at what scale do you advise people to take that in and make something of it? I can imagine someone looking at my face going, oh, good, no problem. That's a very tough question. What's not turned on here is the network. So as you zoom in, it shows where the wells are. So you can get down to the level of looking at a set of wells, and you can see that that set of wells is going down to the level of the wells. So I think that's a good point. I don't think we have a disclaimer that says that here's where we've sampled, we didn't sample elsewhere. Therefore caution should be exercised and extrapolated. But you can, and you can download the data through this website. David. Thanks. Can very interesting presentation. My question relates to the fact that I believe you said the NACA program is sunsetting in 2021. Yes. You've met the intent of Congress to do what exactly Congress said is capture what the water quality is across our nation. Water quality has emerged. Groundwater quality has emerged as a very significant issue across the country, whether it's wherever. It's just Central Valley or Colorado River Valley or wherever. It's an issue. Is the NACA program going to be replaced by another program to carry on the legacy? Or will it indeed be sunsetted and left to float? I would say that's above my pay grade, but it might not be above Sandy's pay grade. That's what I was speaking to this morning. We're rolling our water quality assessments and our water availability assessments together into these integrated water availability assessments. So we are continuing our water quality assessment work It will not be called NACA, but the sampling and we'll be continuing so we can still monitor and track those changes. But we'll be looking at water availability in terms of the quantity and the quality. So we're integrating that effort. And at the end of every 10-year, every decade of NACA, we redesign the program anyway. So this is a natural time to do that. Thank you. Thank you, Ken. I'm sorry that I missed part of your talk. But my question is... It was the best part, by the way. Exactly. Actually, my question is a little bit slightly shifting from nitrate and sort of focusing on some of the organic or metal or other kind of pollution that actually we are dealing with in California as well, especially in urban areas. For example, dry cleaners and the concentration of PCEs and TCEs. And I almost failed in chemistry. So if I'm making a mistake, I apologize. But these are serious concerns and they are actually ubiquitous around the country and actually in different parts of the world. I'm wondering if there is any focus on that? Yeah, I can't... The Groundwater Ambient Monitoring Assessment Program was implemented in California more intensively than what we're doing nationwide. And we looked at every public supply well in the state. And when you look at the aerial resource for California, organic contaminants of any type are present in 0.5% of the aqua system. If, however, you look at where they are and you weight those occurrences by the number of people depending on groundwater and about 5% of the groundwater has high concentrations for any organic contaminant. The top organics were TCE, PCE, and DBCP because DBCP was used as a fumigant in the eastern San Joaquin Valley. Again, if you focus in a little bit more, the same Fernando San Gabriel valleys have extensive TCE and PCE plumes due largely to aircraft cleaning operations during World War II. Those basins are in a situation where a very large number of wells are just on permanent treatment, so they put them through treatment towers. I think in part the perception about organic contamination being of the level of concern is because they occur in population centers that have political representation. And so when the community clearly experiences a problem like that, like lots of people in one place, the newspaper is headquartered there, the legislators are headquartered there, so yes, it's a problem, but in terms of prevalence, my trait as an example is present in about 5% of California's resource at high concentrations, and when your population correct, it's about 5%. I actually want to say, so I'm on the regional water quality control board and actually my exposure to this topic has not been through media, actually through the cases that comes in front of us. Day in and day out and population that complains about the fact that they have a high rate of cancer because there has been a leakage from the dry cleaner in their area. We actually deal with a lot of disputes over who should pay for cleanup. We try to sort of, all these people hired consultants to figure out where the plume is going and how it's moving. So I would say the biggest issue, however, is that some of these water, the wells that are used for water supply by different groups, they depend on deep groundwater while we are moving more and more to our, you know, overusing dose, so this shallow groundwater is becoming a valuable source that we are going to start looking at and what does that mean if we have not been sort of dealing with our industrial waste the way we should have been? Statements, but I didn't mean to. All right, well, let's take that as a segue to our panel and our first question is already lined up. So if the panel could both join the front. So actually I want to, if I may. Sure. I had a comment question for can the question is how much leveraging NACA is having with the toxic program at the USGS because the toxic program is looking at biomarkers in terms of health impacts and they are looking in water supply, not just groundwater. So that is going to be the question. And then on the comment is it's a caution. There's a lot of work in which indicates that the fact that you're not above MCL does not mean that you don't have a health impact. The other thing that we are finding and your data shows that the USGS data shows that when you have organics, you actually have multiple mixtures of organics and the impact of multiple species, we don't yet understand what that is on the health. But biomarkers tend to indicate that the impact is really high. So using this indexes, I think we have to be very careful in putting people in a safe mode that we may not be with the organics. I'm not sure if I'm being clear when I'm saying, but one it's a concern on the data that's being presented into is that I think even data from the USGS is showing the health impact of these organics even though they are at the nano-grounds per liter concentration. The first part of the question about the relationship with the toxics program, before we had the reorganization, we have a national research program where people are doing work that's largely investigator driven. The toxics program incentivized those researchers to do work and would organize locations for people to do that work. The NAWQA program, then when those methods are well developed, the NAWQA program could pick it up and institutionalize it. So a good example are the pharmaceutical compounds. The toxics program working with a couple of folks in the National Lab developed methods for analyzing for a long list of pharmaceutical compounds. I'm pretty sure that that paper that got published in the S&T still might be the number one paper in the United Nations. Once that methodology was well developed, NAWQA could take that method and just routinely sample for it. So those biomarker methods have not yet made it to the National Laboratory as a schedule. And so the NAWQA typically could pick up the work at that point. So that's just with respect to toxics. So toxics has been a leader in a sense, that they identify a fruitful way of working so that a production operation like NAWQA can do that. The second part of the question, I don't want to suggest that organics aren't a problem. There's a long list of constituents that we know to be above the health-based thresholds and yet aren't receiving the kind of attention that perhaps they ought to. And manganese would be one of those, which is a neurotoxin and doesn't have a regulatory threshold. So I'm trying to call attention to those things that affect the lower concentrations. It's been settled, and yet, we're not doing much about it. Thank you. I see Mark and I saw another hand in the back. Sorry, I don't know your name. Rich. Dave, Dave, Nusha. I was surprised I didn't see... I was surprised I didn't see hex van chromium. Did that show up on your list? We've sampled for hex van chromium in several of our arid places. It's high in a few places in California that we've published on. So again, it's not one of those things that's prevalent. You have to have the right source rocks and then the right redox conditions for it to be showing up at those depth zones. And then in your top whatever 5, 10 list. Because monitoring, we did it. It's American water in our ground. Highest was Arizona. Luckily we sold those wells. And then California took pretty much in the same area as the arsenic, so I was surprised I didn't see that. Now you said you started... you had some slides on pharmaceuticals. If you had any time, can you give us the bottom line if you want to... I can describe it. What did you find in the wells in the pharmaceuticals? The public supply wells, which were really well distributed. The detection rate for any pharmaceutical or hormone compound was about 6%. We sampled for 120 compounds. I don't remember the breakdown between hormones and pharmaceuticals. There was one detection of a pharmaceutical compound above a health-based threshold. After that, none of the detections were even one-tenth the benchmark. So the detections are typically very low. If you look at the kinds of settings, the crystalline rocks, which have very low porosity, had the highest detection rates. Old groundwater had very low detection rates, but not zero. Younger groundwater had higher detection rates. Shallower wells, more detections than deeper wells. Then, if you look at the KOC or the KOW, it's not fully predictive. If a larger proportion of the wells that are highly soluble or don't strongly soar, got detected, but it wasn't a clear story that, just because it has a low solubility and a high sorptivity doesn't mean it didn't get detected in groundwater. There was no correlation with use. When you look at just poundages. So that would be the bottom line. Dave Wagner, I think. This is for Jay. I remember when you first brought you and your students started coming to the Hill to educate us, and that was very helpful because for the first time, we could see the data trends and what was happening to groundwater supplies in the Central Valley. In particular, Colorado River Basin, et cetera. My question is, is that, I know you perhaps haven't done it, but your colleagues have looked at this from a global perspective. One of the big areas, and I was just in China last November, looking at groundwater development, so we say in China, it was related primarily to agriculture and municipal industrial efforts. To me, it seems that because of the role of groundwater in water security, and I think in fact you mentioned that, that we should be focusing on investments in helping to call it sustainability, but managed use of groundwater in these areas. To your knowledge, here's the question finally. To your knowledge, is the State Department, World Bank, OECD, other financial institutions taking the data and looking at it in respect to water investments? Yeah, I think, but not any, yes. And so I visited with both the, in the last year, World Bank and the Latin American Development Bank, and not in any comprehensive way. And this is a little bit scary. I think maybe a good example for that is just looking at the African continent as a whole. When we look at the GRACE data, there's a lot of, you would think, oh, it's Africa, there's no water. Well, it's actually a fair amount of groundwater and it's mostly undeveloped, right? It's not a very heavily populated continent. But yet we're seeing other countries like China and Saudi Arabia move in there, right? Develop, so they're developing the groundwater resources for themselves. So these are just things we have to watch out for. What's happening in China, there's some real hotspots that show up globally. Certainly the North China Plain and the Chancheng region are both super agricultural regions and they're big red hotspots on our global maps. It's a tougher place. So China's a tougher place to work with, you know, for various reasons. So anyway, lots of work to be done. Most of it is piecemeal. One of the reasons why I moved to Saskatchewan is to try to provide some global vision on these issues. And so any input on that, I appreciate it. Thanks, and I missed Richard. I'm sorry, then we'll go back. Jay, your GRACE data in the mid-Atlantic down to Florida coast, specifically along the coastline, you showed a positive increase of water. Do you think that's just an artifact of sea level rise because of the granularity of the data? No. I don't think so. I have to look at it a little bit more closely. Whenever you look at a narrow region, it gets a little bit trickier because it's hard to filter out the ocean signal. And so I retract what I said it actually could be. Maybe not sea level rise, but it's just sort of, we call it aliasing. So it's including some of that. And so if we really wanted to get the answer, we'd have to do some special processing and make estimates for things like sea level rise and sort of correct that and see what's going on. Thanks. Dave, sound back. Well, both of our speakers have very informative talks and a lot to think about. Since we have some high level state representatives in the room, my question is about whether we, the information you presented on water quality, you presented Jay on available groundwater resources. Is it at an actionable level? Or to turn that around maybe to the state folks, how will this inform state actions? What kind of further development is needed to take this kind of information to help with decision making, with regulatory decision making, local decision making? Is it enough for action? It seems pretty specific. I just wonder what the, let's put John and Max on the spot or John or anybody else. But I would like the state view of utility. Well, I can, I mean, in terms of the grace data and the trends that those data were showing, I think we're seeing that. I mean, we're at a more granular level. We're at an extensive network of monitor wells that are showing exactly what it describes, but in more at a higher level of resolution. So I think we're getting that information already. It's useful to see the trends. And I think worldwide it's informative. But that, that didn't really tell us much that we didn't already know, no offense. I'm not saying there's no value in that, in that information. And in terms of the groundwater quality side of things, similarly, I noticed that there was uptick of nitrates showing up in central Texas. And I know that area very well. I used to work at the Barton Springs segment on the Barton Springs segment of the Edwards Opera in the city of Austin is all over that. And they've got very extensive monitoring that I've got a very extensive mitigation programs for endangered species and how to manage them. So I think it's useful information, but my personal familiarity with some of what we saw is that those folks are aware of it. It's useful in that they've perhaps that showed them something that didn't know before, but they were able to dig in on a deeper level to address the issue. Yes, I mean, I think it was actionable in helping our legislature develop our groundwater management law, which Jay alluded to and continues to be actionable in terms of maintaining pressure on both the state and local agencies to live up to the commitments they made, whether that actually means sustainability as we conceive of it or some lesser level of management. But yes. So if I may follow up on that. So thanks, Max. I appreciate that. But I've heard that before. And so I think one of the great success stories of the work that we've done with Grace is at a higher level. And so at the state level, California is a big state level and at the national level, because that's what it's good for. It's showing you that picture. And we did a lot of communication based around, not just me, everyone. So we were talking about media this morning. There was an intensive focus on what was happening in California. And my work and other work really contributed to that and getting the message across. So hopefully we all know, right, if we're water managers in Texas or California, yeah, we know that the depletion is happening, but we need to convey that to the public so that they'll vote for it. So that the pressure or we're giving the governor some cover to go ahead and do some things. So when people saw some of the, in particular, some of that Grace stuff, whether it was papers or these images that I was talking about, those were actionable at the higher level, right? That sort of a governor and a, you know, it certainly at a national level, but we don't really have any national policy. Okay. We have three questions queued up, two in the room and one online. And so we're not going to take it anymore, but and we'll take a break. So Nusha, then Carl and then online. Thank you. And Jay wanting actually, I think this sort of lines up with a question that Dave asked. I think this all adds up to environmental governance or the governance as a general format, right? So it can help us to govern our natural resources better, provide funding, you know, legislation, regulations that are very important, valuable, and then local, you know, actors can decide how they want to take that to the next level. So I think that that was very important. One thing I want to ask you, maybe two things. One is the new Grace that's going up. Is the specifics of the satellite any, there's any difference between the temporal and special resolution? And then the second thing is, what do you think the role of these other sort of tools? For example, drones or NSAR or some of the other, other high resolution data gather. Grace follow-up mission is basically a carbon copy of the original mission. It's called a climate continuation mission. There is an experimental, you know, I mentioned how the satellites are basically measuring the relative position. You know, there's an experimental laser system on there compared to a microwave system in the original Grace, but it won't really increase the resolution. But I did show you some other research. You know, lots of people are working on downscaling and just ing in models and all that, but the mission is basically the same carbon copy mission. I spoke so much already forgot the second question. What was it? The role of these other. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I think that there is, so in terms of enhancing resolution, I think there's great opportunities to combine GPS and NSAR, so interferometric synthetic aperture radar. Lots of work needs to be done, but there's lots of promise there, and there'll be areas and times. And also that's where I think maybe some data analytics and machine learning can help us out quite a bit. The actual physical processes are super complicated because there's all the reflections from the radar, reflections from the radar, but there may be some sort of macro things we can get out of data analytics. So lots of lots of potential and a lot of ongoing research there. So, Ken, I wanted to follow up a point that I think Nisha sort of brought up in my mind. I have no doubt that these deeper aquifers with thousands of years are, you know, your data looks pretty good, but there's a significant part of the population that gets water from private wells that have issues. They don't have good casings that block off the shallow from the upper, and I was reminded of some work that we did a number of years ago on agrochemicals and drinking water, and the incredible data set for what's called the AMP, the Atrazine Monitoring Program. And that was by, I think there are some legal reasons why they had to sample in these particular locations, but they sampled in intensively. And what we found is that the sensitive populations, in our case we were looking at, so when, I think it's the three months before a baby is born, what is the mother drinking? And it turns out that, I found my old slide, I called it Aries Taurus Babies. They're actually exposed to one-tenths during the important gestational periods. They're exposed to one-tenths the exposure of Atrazine than babies born at different times of the year, because the mother is drinking water that is 10 times more higher levels of Atrazine. Now, Atrazine is applied at different times of the year in the same way that we see in all kinds of work that nitrate levels go up and down throughout the year. Do you have any data that is of sufficient resolution temporally to be able to capture that intra-year variability? No, because the, you know, it seems to say the domestic wells, those wells, when they're sampled, they're sampled once every 10 years for the full suite. But to speak to that point, there were 2,000 domestic wells, the geogenic sources were 15%, the man-made sources were 5%, so 5% is a lot, but it's not as much as 15. And when you look at that 5%, 4% is nitrate, and then less than 1% each is pesticides and organics. So those results might fly in the face of intensive studies. And I think this is an important philosophical issue for scientists. We often pursue problems, problem areas intensively, and then we're asked to generalize our results from that specific study. But if we study problems, we may not be studying the whole thing. So these are prevalence-slash-assessment studies, and everything's on equal terms. And so for domestic wells, manganese is more prevalent at high concentrations than any other constituents, and yet we don't do much about it. So again, I'm going to kind of keep emphasizing it's not saying these things aren't a problem. If you think these other things are a problem, then here's a set of other things that one ought to be concerned with as well. Then with respect to, say, time series, we are doing some work on time series. We've got 24 wells around the country where we have continuous monitors in place. There are eight locations, wells of three depths, and we visit those wells every two months. There are no continuous monitors for accuracy. So we're sampling for the full analytical suite on this sort of basis. But if you started to say, look at epidemiology, well, 24 wells are not going to do that. And one of those sites, just one of those wells has the same cost as a 30-well network. Of course, if you sample it for six times a year, so the costs just explode. So the answer is we're looking at time series. We don't have the resources to do it with epidemiological scale on a frequent basis. An aqua-cycle form. Okay, we have one more question from someone online. I'm sorry, I don't know who it is. I'm going to let you chime in, and then we're going to take a break. Hi, can you guys hear me? Yes, go ahead, please. This is Yo Chen. I'm calling from my field site in the Arctic. So I have a question for Ken. So you mentioned about organics and everything else. We talked about emerging contaminants and legacy contaminants. What about, I mean, the big thing you see in the news these days is PFOS and PFOA. I mean, is NACWA version 2.0 going to kind of address this as well? The answer is yes. Again, the analytical schedules for those constituents were not available at the beginning of the cycle. It wasn't sort of routinely built in. And again, you can imagine what it takes to pull all this off. 15 water science centers. So everything's very systematic. We are sampling for PFOS compounds presently. And one of the aqua systems we're sampling are stream valley aquifers. That's an add-on. Again, because we ran this more efficient than usual. So we had some funding available to do that. So we added the stream valley aquifers like the Arkansas River, the Platte, some of the ones in Ohio. And the PFOS are on those. And then all of our decadal networks that we haven't visited yet, this cycle, we've added those schedules to those networks. Okay. So sort of the answer is kind of, you know, 70% of the cycle went by and so those wells are in the past. And we haven't figured out how to sample in the past yet. Okay, great. Thanks. Stay warm, buddy. All right. It's not that bad up here. I mean, it was 68 degrees yesterday. Oh, wow. Yeah, but the fundamental problem with the Arctic is it's too warm. Right. Yes. So, but today's a little chilly, but, but yes. Yo, this is Carl Rockney. Is this perhaps your project with Jennifer Gerard? It is. I think she is in the cafeteria right now. Oh, okay. It's, it's good to see our 1440 funds are being well spent. Thanks for that project. Take care. Okay. With that, I think let's thank our panel. Then those two presentations were really quick. We, let's take, we scheduled for 15 minute break. We went over a little bit. So let's, let's come back at 25. Can we go that long? Okay. Let's go back and 325. Okay, everybody, please re-take your seat. Okay. So here's the plan for the next hour ish. We have four speakers that are going to talk about a, give us case studies. So we're going to go back to our states and hear a 10 minute case study from each state. I'm going to time keep, I'm going to try to be really firm about the 10 minutes. We won't do questions right away. We'll just go boom, boom, boom. And then when that's all done, the four presenters as well as our previous two panelists, Ken and Jay will sit in the front and we'll have a free for all. Okay. So 10 minutes. Go. All right. 10 minutes. Not a lot of time to cover groundwater in California, although luckily Jay kicked it off a little bit. So, so I'll try not to repeat some of it. Okay. So we've got a lot of issues, quality issues, overdraft issues and the equity issues that go with those, particularly when we have drought conditions on the coast, we have sea level rise and then we have this sort of broad, you know, how is our agricultural sector transforming due to the need to try to balance out groundwater basins? And then how do we get more water in the ground, which is what everyone would like to do. It is certainly one of those things that is easier said or planned for than done. So on the quality side, I touched a little bit on this this morning that the real focus has been on communities that don't have the capacity to treat their contaminated groundwater sources. And what is the state's solution for that? We now have a funding source, which is going to be into the tune of $130 million a year, at least for the next 10 years, to really focus on the million people. And that's communities, schools, what we call very small systems with fewer than 15 service connections, as well as domestic wells, and try to get as many of those million people safe water, safe drinking water as quickly as we can. And then, of course, we have to deal with the new contaminants coming on the scene. Okay, so here's the map of what the state's groundwater basins look like in terms of their level of overdraft. So the orange colors, those are the basins that have the highest levels of overdraft. And as you can see, that's mostly focused in the valley. Although if you look down here at LA, I don't think this, oh, there it goes. You can see that there are a lot of critical basins there as well. And again, what this really speaks to is what is going to happen over time as we implement this groundwater management law and the agricultural practices have to shift a little bit. So the law known as SIGMA, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, was passed in 2014. And as you can see, it sort of gives a long implementation timeframe to actually get to sustainability of groundwater basins and it's left to these GSAs, Groundwater Sustainability Agencies. There are over 150 of them in the state to try to come up with a plan and then implement that plan, which of course can consist of many things, but fundamentally trying to get more water in when there's water available and curtailing withdrawals as needed. And then five-year reviews. The other thing that comes with this legislation is some more data, which we hope will be particularly valuable for all kinds of future work, particularly on who's using how much, where and what's it being used for. At the state level, we've never tracked this before and the records that existed before this law was passed were pretty sparse. Okay, so recharge, which is what everyone's focused on right now because no one wants to ask the hard questions about, okay, when we can only pump 60% of what we were pumping, who takes that hit? So everyone's focused on recharge at the moment and these questions have arisen. They don't necessarily have answers, but there's been a debate, for example, in our code as to what actually counts as beneficial use does recharge for its own sake, counts beneficial use. Some people say, yay, our official agency position is no. What happens when some of the groundwater that was recharged is lost. People always focus on if they think they're getting their full share and then it's not there. Who can they blame? And then this third bullet is a really interesting one. We have some of our wealthier water districts in Southern California have invested in groundwater banks in the Central Valley and the question that really gives me anxiety at night is, well, if we're in the midst of a deep drought, even if that groundwater basin isn't empty, should that Southern California agency really get that water ahead of other people who don't have the same level of resources? What is that agreement really worth in that emergency scenario? It's an interesting question to ponder. And hopefully it won't be called to question that soon. And then, of course, not all recharge is just let the water flow onto the ground and it shall percolate. A lot of recharge projects require investments. Even if you're not direct injecting, you've still got to invest in the land or if it's next to the river, do it in a way that you're maximizing recharge. We don't have necessarily funds for that, although these groundwater sustainability agencies are supposed to be able to levy fees to help with those type of things. Okay, Jay alluded to this in his talk about, well, what do we really mean by sustainability? Well, as many things we do in California, the language in the statute is very aspirational. The idea is that all the groundwater basins have a sustainable yield by 2042. What happens when we're in 2036 and it's clear that half of them or more will never be near that is, again, an open question. We have about 2,900 community water systems in the state. We have 7,400 water systems total, but 2,900 of them serve communities and we do an annual electronic survey. It's not really a survey because it's mandatory, but where we ask them a whole series of questions and over the past couple of years, we've added additional questions about climate readiness and water loss, distribution system loss control and rates and a whole host of other topics. One of the things we asked them about in the most recent survey was, well, what do you see as your biggest threat? And what you can see here is of the responses, drought and groundwater are the highest issue of concern for the greatest number of systems. And what this one shows, again, just focusing here is that of the systems, again, the yellow bars, the highest will not implement, but you have a significant number, the black and red and green bars here, that have either built deeper wells or drilled deeper wells or have it in process. But that is an investment strategy that these drinking water systems are looking at as groundwater levels decline. So here are a few more questions that we are grappling with as a state and a society. So the first one, we have a state senator who represents the district that contains a lot of the friant current canal, which is one of these agricultural water distribution canals that have been built in the state, and it is breaking due to land subsidence, due to overdraft. And so the question is, should California collectively as taxpayers foot the bill for that or not? Or should the people who created the subsidence in the first place do it? So that's an interesting debate happening in the legislature this year. Of course, during the drought, we had lots of wells go dry, and we know that in some parts of the state those wells went dry because next door was a well-resourced farmer or agricultural district that could afford to drill deeper and those shallow groundwater wells went dry. Again, who pays, whose responsibility is that? So far it's been the state as the provider of last resort. We had a debate leading up to this year's budget about whether we should increase fees on fertilizer to account for the impacts of nitrate pollution. It looks like that fee is no longer on the table, unfortunately. And then we also have 150-odd new agencies that are now charged with managing groundwater, and there's been a lot of concern that the same well-healed interests that controlled groundwater before will simply control these new agencies and will continue perpetuating the equity concerns. So I think that the big question here is what is the future of agriculture look like in California? Most of the groundwater is used for agricultural purposes. We irrigate about 9 million acres in the state. Of those 9 million acres, about half of them are for grapes and tree nuts. And those are profitable investments. However, they're also thirsty investments. And so I think there's a big question here about as these groundwater management agencies are forced to curtail some of the usage, what will that mean in terms of the economic drivers? Will the farmers shift to maybe more sustainable crops that are not as high-yield? And what does that mean for investors that have poured a lot of money into certain types of grapes and tree nuts over the past couple of decades? And then, of course, second and third order impacts as climate change makes the summers even hotter in the valley and we see shifts north and west to the cooler areas. What does that look like in terms of employment patterns, land use? One thing that I think is finally being discussed that was really a long time in coming is my agency has responsibility for managing the water resources, but we don't have the ability to run a workforce development and training program per se. But just as we witnessed at a national scale the transition over the latter half of the 20th century away from the rust belt and loss of jobs and those former sources of employment, I think we have to think really hard and be really diligent about making sure that our agricultural communities, our farm worker communities, where production is going to decline, that there are alternate economic avenues for people to maintain a living and their own economic viability. So that's sort of the thing I'll leave you with is from our perspective in California that that's one of the biggest questions I think about how to do this all is making sure that we don't miss the real human impact as we try to maintain the environmental balance. So I think that's it. Thank you. So we'll go ahead, go straight to Florida. Is Tom on the line? Yeah, let me get going here. How are we doing? That sounds great. And I'll interrupt you in about nine minutes and say one more minute to go if we're still. Okay. Take it away. All right. So I'll try to move very quickly as well. So in my talk this morning, I made a quick note of springs as being a priority. And I thought I would highlight as the case study here in large part because I don't think any other system would highlight groundwater surface interactions better. And so I will start with you go to the next slide. Okay, so as I said earlier, we had about 700 springs or more in the state of Florida, several first magnitude springs. They're iconic systems that little picture up in the left hand corner is HT Odom who did some seminal work in some spring systems here in Florida and really was instrumental in doing some community college, the work and community metabolism work. And for the most part, springs in this state were thought to be dominated by these large vascular plants. The grass is primarily with very little algae problems. If you're in the next slide. You can see here, this is what a lot of our springs look like now. There's a high degree of filamentous algae in them. Other invasive species and a general kind of decline or deterioration of the vascular plant community, the rooted vascular plants. Next slide. So the question is, you know, where we headed in our state with regard to springs and why are they being degraded? And they, if you go to the next slide, this is kind of the poster child of what people think the problem is. And so the yellow dots there are indicative of nitrate concentrations and at the spring event and wiki wachi springs, which is a first magnitude spring in the long, the kind of central Gulf coast of Florida and the blue symbols there are population numbers. So, you know, in the last, you know, 30 40 years or so, you can see that nitrate concentrations have increased in this spring system from background concentrations that are about 50 micrograms or so per liter to now above one. And that's typical of most of the spring systems or a majority of the spring systems in our state. Extreme increases in nitrate concentrations reflective of ground water nitrate contamination. So if you go to the next slide. The question obviously is linking that observation to the ecological integrity of the springs and to kind of put a little more data this I'm going to highlight two systems that I've worked on for a very long time since the late 1990s. And if you go to the next slide. There, these are two spring fed coastal rivers just north of that wiki wachi river system. There are about 10 kilometers in length and they discharge directly into the Gulf of Mexico. Next slide. All right, so I'm going to again look at the issue of nitrate concentrations. This is a much a truncated time period relative to the graph that I showed you for wiki wachi but what you see over from that 1997 to 2012 timeframe when we were actually collecting data at the in the upper part of the river you can see that we collected an increase in nitrate concentrations from about 0.4 milligrams per liter to close to six in both of these systems. So about a 50% increase in just a little over a decade. Next slide. And so con commitment with that increase in nitrate concentration was a decline in vascular plant biomass and one of the systems, the Chasiewiczka, the one to the biomass decrease by about 50% in the homo sasa by the year 2012 vascular plants were largely extirpated from that system. Okay. Next slide. So where the vascular plants remain, you know, during that same timeframe, there was about a four fold increase in the periphyton burden or periphyton load on those plants. Next slide. So here's the narrative, right? And so it's this general eutrophication progression scheme that has been described by a number of people. This one actually was first described by Carlos Duarte in the 1990s. And it kind of goes like this, right? Here's the narrative. If you increase the nutrient delivery, you're going to ultimately enhance the micro algal and macro algal growth. That algae is going to essentially shade out the vascular plants. You know, it's going to increase respiration in your system. The vascular plants aren't going to be able to maintain a carbon balance. And ultimately they're going to die out. And the system is going to lack the structural characteristics you need to provide other ecosystem functions. So that's the narrative. And if you go to the next slide. And that led to this, right? And what we call the nitrogen limitation hypothesis that simply stated, it's an increasing nitrate concentration in Florida Springs have alleviated nutrient limitations promoting higher growth rates of algae, which in turn have led to the proliferation of macro algal blooms in Florida Springs. Next slide. So one of the things that is problematic about that simple narrative is that we neglected the grazing component in large part. And we've also failed to consider some of the other physical and chemical characteristics in the system that might exert some type of influence on algal dynamics. Next slide. So there are, I'll now come back to both of those things later, the, the grazers and the other kind of physical characteristics of the systems. But I want to just point out that there are some challenges to the nitrogen limitation hypothesis. And I want to work through four of these pretty quickly. One is the fact that the relationship between algal abundance and nitrate concentrations and the majority of the, if you look at the whole population of Springs, that relationship is really weak. When you actually look at the temporal kind of timeframe of what's happening here, the, the nitrate enrichment in most cases appears to proceed the algal proliferation problem by extended period of time. And when we actually do the experiments, the asset is in many of these systems to test for nitrogen limitation. We don't see it. And then finally, when you actually look at the metabolism, what we see is that the nitrogen flexes in the system generally far exceed the autotropic demand, even under kind of background nitrate concentrations, as I said before, about, you know, 50 micrograms per liter or so. So next slide. So here are some of these things that, again, shed some, some light, I guess, or some concern on the adopting that, that nitrogen limitation hypothesis. This is the relationship between nitrate concentration and algae cover. It was in a paper that was published by Stevenson and early part of in the 2000s. But again, this shotgun approach here doesn't give you much confidence that there is a strong nitrate algae relationship in spring systems. Next slide. So when I say nutrient enrichment appears to have preceded the establishment of algal maps by considerable period, I mean, by decades, you know, when I see how it was first starting to work in the Silver River Silver Spring System, 1950s, even by late 1950s, groundwater nitrate concentrations were elevated, pretty, you know, substantially elevated relative historical backgrounds with no signs of algae problems, really in the literature until maybe the late 1970s, maybe even early, late 80s and maybe early 90s. So when we talk about the time differential, I guess oftentimes we're talking about decades. So next slide. So there's been a number of people that have tried to carry out and do nutrient addition bioassays to determine what the limiting nutrient is in the system and the vast majority of them show either no limitation by nitrogen, but more importantly, phosphorus often is the limiting factor in these systems. All right. So another nutrient obviously of concern, but again, the focus is entirely on nitrate with regard to springs in Florida. Next slide. All right. So again, I don't, I didn't, I wanted to make sure we had enough time so I didn't put a bunch of data in here. When we actually do the mass balance calculations for nitrogen in the spring systems, it does in fact suggest that the nitrogen flux has exceeded the autotropic demand even under historic conditions. When we actually do the math, probably less than 1% of these systems, I mean, well in these systems, probably less than 1% of the nitrogen is actually used, right? That's available for plant metabolism, plant algae metabolism. So obviously that that can interest time and move on. So when we think then, well what could be causing the issue there? There's some work recently that suggests that may not be in high enough abundance to actually control algae. One of the problems that we have is we don't have good historical numbers, abundance estimates of grazers in these systems, but we also know that oxygen concentrations have been going down in many of these systems. Many of them are hypoxic, anorhynoxic, and under those conditions, the primary grazers which are our gastropods don't feed well. And so the consumption of algae is limited. So nonetheless, the densities of grazers don't exist in most of these systems to control the problematic algae. And so in that sense, the algae may have kind of exceeded a critical threshold. The one thing I wanted to talk about today was flow mediated impacts. And so if you go to the next slide, there's a recent paper, and GEOF is Global Research Letters by Nathan Rieber and colleagues, and I've taken two figures out of that paper to talk about here. This is essentially a conceptual diagram that talks about this concept of perhaps there are critical thresholds and stream flow velocity that affect the amount of algae that are growing on the surface of the macrofibes. And so on the left-hand panel, up and up and excuse me, panel A, what you see is two kind of probability density distributions. And one is for low paraffite and cover that's in the red, and one's for high paraffite and cover that's in the black. And essentially, if you go to the right of that panel A, what you see is that, okay, at the higher flow velocities that you have low paraffite and abundance on the macrofites, at low flow velocities, you have higher paraffite and abundance. On the bottom panel B, that's kind of a conceptual diagram of what might happen if you interrupt or restore flow in these systems with regard to paraffite and abundance, and it's set up in this framework where you can say, well, if we actually, if you look at panel B on the left side at time zero, when you start off with high flow and low paraffite and cover, but you interrupt that flow, essentially I'll restrict it and reduce it. You would expect an increase and now we'll cover, but if you restore the flow, if it returns to a low cover state, then there's no hysteresis involved. And so we're very interested in that mechanism as well. So if you go to the next slide. Maybe finish up here pretty quick. Yeah, as fast as I can. And so these are the empirical data. And essentially what this panel on the left says is, hey, you know, there is in fact a threshold that you see, and it's about 0.2, 0.23 meters per second, which is evident in the springs. It's borne out by the empirical data. Next slide. And why that's important is when, if you could take that cover data and convert it to a biomass data, there's this shows you what the paraffite and load that causes a negative effect by way of light transmission on industrial plants. And that has management implications. So next slide. What are the conclusions? Nitrate concentrations are increasing. No doubt. Submerged aquatic vegetation is declining. No doubt. The paraffite and those on the remnant plant populations are increasing. No doubt as well. The reductions in spring discharge are apparent and flow velocities have been shown to exert a strong influence on paraffite and abundance with potential for negative effects on the submerged macrophytes. Where do we go from here? I think we need to better understand the relative influence of groundwater withdrawals and climate on groundwater levels and stream flows. And it's increasingly clear that there's not one hammer solution to the problem of algal proliferation in these springs. And finally we need to understand more fully the interactions between nutrients and flow rates. There you go. Done. Thank you very much. Great. Okay. Maryland. All right. So I'm glad we're talking about spring because I want to talk a little bit about streams. And I'm always happy to see submerged aquatic vegetation. It's always a good thing no matter where you are. So thank you for that, Florida. Again, the framework in Maryland is a Chesapeake Bay restoration. And for those of you that don't know that we've, Maryland has achieved our total maximum control for phosphorus and nitrogen and sediment primarily through two control areas. The first one is by upgrading our wastewater treatment plants. So 50% of our nutrient reductions have come from improved wastewater treatment throughout the state of Maryland. That's a phenomenal achievement. Somewhere over 40, around 45% of the rest of our nutrient reduction has been achieved through annual practices in agriculture, specifically to practices with the highest proportion of farmers that practice cover crops and no-till agriculture. So those are so far to date how the Chesapeake Bay from the Maryland perspective has been restored. Our partners in Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, West Virginia, D.C. have all been active players and they've had slightly different strategies. Again, the second frame in Maryland is that climate change concern that we have in our active engagement, in particular that flashy weather that affected Ellicott City with those two 1,000-year storms in about two years. So for those of you that aren't familiar with Maryland, we are the fifth most densely populated state in the nation. Small state, small state. That trend of increasing flashy water means that there's a higher focus on our stormwater management. Of course, our stormwater management is impacted primarily by nine counties and cities that have 80% of our population and about 70% of our impervious surface. And like most places developed Atlantic side, we've developed far before we had regulations around stormwater management. So most of our designed infrastructure is really just trying to move stormwater, not trying to infiltrate it or get secondary benefits out of it. So we've had a series of, we're working on our third generation stormwater management permit in MDE. So generally what we try to do with our stormwater management is restore impervious surface. So take that built environment and crunch it up and turn it into something else. Generally cities don't want to do that. They want to increase road surfaces and not decrease it, right? So in our third generation, we've doubled the requirement and of course lawsuits have ensued. We've insisted that 20% of unmanaged impervious surface have got to be treated, somehow treated. Now that does not necessarily mean that we're requiring them to break up roads and concrete. We've got science-based practices. So we have a team of researchers who help validate practices that can be used to improve impervious surface. So stream restoration is one of the areas that I really want to focus on a little bit as a good news, bad news scenario in the state of Maryland. So again, just broad context how we make our decisions. We need really good decision-making to incorporate social benefits as well as science-based benefits. It can't be one-dimensional. Permittees right now in the state of Maryland spend $1.5 billion to restore impervious surface. The cost ranges depending on where you are in Maryland from 24,000 to $42,000 per acre of restored surface. Think about that. Do you know how much it costs to put a cover crop on an acre of farmland? Between $45 and $90 per acre. They're equivalent. In fact, cover crop, you can argue for nitrogen is a better treatment solution. What are we doing? And yet our environmental colleagues are pushing us to move from these annual practices to permanent practices, restored infrastructure. I don't disagree with them. But economically I can't justify it. I can't just change the impervious to non-impervious based on nitrogen. There's a cheaper, better way to do it. So if we should restore our impervious surface, how should we do it and why should we do it? How do we think about the future of our built environment and address multiple issues? And especially when the range of costs is orders of magnitude different. So stormwater communities are being pushed to look and to consider at large scale infrastructure shifts. Future billion-dollar investments. Right now, today, we use stream restoration. A lot of really good science behind it. It's been well-established and implemented by generally private companies. Some nonprofits are involved in stream restoration. But each company, each nonprofit has a slightly different model about how they should or design model that they want to implement on streams. In some of our urban and suburban areas, it requires large-scale removal of trees. Yikes. If you're managing the media, hey, we're going to fix your stream and destroy your forest canopy. No, really, it'll be worth it, we think. So there's been a call to look at how the design works in different environments. There's been a call to understand which designs are best. We're looking at things like flow rates, flow rate populations. We want to know how these stream restoration designs perform under climate change conditions with flashier water. Are we going to blow out these designs that are used in some cases to slow down velocity? Is that just going to be blown out and all that money is going to be washed down the creek, so to speak? So we have a lot of questions. There's a lot of different groups involved in this. They have a lot of skin in the game. They've got a lot to lose if their design doesn't function. It is part of both our stormwater management and our Bay Restoration Program. So you can get financial inputs from both of those. That's a good thing, I think. One of the things that the state has required, any county or permittee that uses stormwater or stream restoration, they're required to monitor. Some of our permittees are doing a fantastic job. Detailed monitoring that they hook up to their flood risk assessment, they're doing a great job. They're looking long term at trends of macroinvertebrates. They're doing a great job. Some of our permittees are not. They're small towns, they're communities. They don't. They're slapping in a monitor here and there, sending out somebody. Maybe the riverkeeper will do it for them. They're filing that with MDE or putting it on a shelf somewhere. Meanwhile, the state is asking all these core questions. The good news in the state of Maryland is that we have a quasi-governmental funding agency, the Chesapeake Bay Trust. Jana Davis is the executive director. And she takes a funding source. You're from around, you've seen our bay license plates, the funding sources from the sales of those bay license plates. And she suggested, hey, let's do a pooled monitoring approach. So this group has established a set of streams that serve as a base that they sample regularly. And then they regularly put out a call for proposals to address the concerns of the regulated constituents and the regulators about what is the performance of this stream restoration. So it's the approach that both includes long-term monitoring, baseline monitoring, as well as specific targeted questioning. We're on our second or third year now of our pooled monitoring approach. Our regulated communities, if they're doing a great job monitoring by themselves, they're fine. They don't have to change anything. But for those communities that either don't want to monitor or are doing a poor job, they can buy into the pooled monitoring program. And somebody else will take over and do the monitoring for them. So we've got a lot of questions about what we should be measuring. What monitoring should go on forever? And at some point, we sort of answer some questions, right? And we can probably quit monitoring certain things. So what should we monitor long term? What should we quit monitoring after we've established that a threshold has met? Is stream restoration an effective tool for impervious management? Where should we install these? What's the best bang for our buck? Headland seems to be the answer. What about toxins? How do these restoration approaches affect toxins or not? And how do we optimize the design to address multiple outcomes and make sure our investment strategies are really cost-effective, innovative, and getting us across the line from multiple areas? So we want to make sure that we're withstanding climate change. We also want to make sure that the quality of life of the citizens of Maryland is improved with this large-scale investment. Thank you. Great. And back to Texas. Yeah, here comes Texas for a sprint to the finish. So I've got a lot to cover in 10 minutes. Uh-oh. Technical difficult. OK. All right. Jump ahead. All right, let's jump into it. OK. Welcome to West Texas, y'all. Where's Jay? Is he here? Suzanne appreciates that. OK. I wanted to narrow in for my case study on an area of the state that's sort of a confluence of a lot of the challenges that I talked about earlier. So I'm going to go through specific Valverde County. And this is a Valverde County sits atop the Edwards Trinity plateau aqua system that covers a large part of the southwestern part of the state. Here in cross-section in terms of the hydrostratigraphy, these are Cretaceous Age dolomites and limestones, namely built of two aqua systems, the Trinity here at depth. And then there Edwards aqua here at the surface. So this is the same Edwards aqua that provides for San Antonio, Austin. Again, a very mature car system and moving from north to south with a really mature car system along the faults down here in the southern part of the county. So it makes for a very interesting hydrological situation. In terms of the flow and occurrence of groundwater, Valverde County is the regional discharge point for this entire aqua system. And you see the flow lines kind of coming down from the north to the south. It flows down towards the Rio Grande and it discharges its base flow along the Pecos River, along the Devils River, and a number of springs that are sprinkled out through the entire area. And again, you really see well-developed car development along these stream systems and down here around where the Lake Amistad is and then also in the southern part of the county. This also is a home to a number of very, very large spring systems, namely good enough springs. I don't name these things. I'm not sure what's called. It's more than good enough. It's a really big one. And it's actually under Lake Amistad. It's under 150 feet of water beneath the reservoir and still discharges about 50,000 acre feet per year. And then we've got San Felipe Springs, which is the source water of San Felipe Creek. It discharges about 80,000 acre feet a year. So a lot of water flowing through the system. In terms of the overall uses of the Edwards-Octafra in the region, this is a really sparsely populated part of the state. Only about 50,000 people in total population. So Edwards-Octafra is the primary source of water, but you experience well yields that are highly variable. Along these really well-developed car systems, you can have wells that produce 2,000 gallons per minute. You get in between the watersheds that can be, it's matric parasi. It could be as much as a gallon per minute. So really highly variable. In terms of the uses, irrigated agriculture up in the upper part of the county along the watersheds in these really prolific conduit systems are one of the main sources and then also municipal supply. But all total, all these uses added up, it's only about 5,000 acre feet a year of total demand on this really prolific system. So in terms of the surface water sources, most of the surface water source from groundwater. This is groundwater and surface water really coming together with the regional discharge from the octafra, or the octafra discharging regionally in this part of the county. Pecos River here, dominant groundwater sources, base flow. The Devils River, it's entirely sourced from groundwater as base flow and it's perennial river as a result of it. Then we've also got the Lake Amistad, which all these rivers flow into, which is an impounded reservoir on the Rio Grande River built for the purposes of flood control. Then of course, I already mentioned San Felipe Springs here that sorts San Felipe Creek. All of this contributes to Rio Grande flow, flow in the Rio Grande. So one of the key takeaways here is that these flows are actually supporting several uses. One of them that doesn't get talked about a lot is endangered species habitat. There's some really interesting species that have been found within these car systems. One of the more interesting ones is this Mexican blind catfish that actually lives in the subsurface within the octafra. It's a Mexican-listed endangered species, which means we also treat it as an endangered species. Just recently, there's been the Texas Horned Shell Mussel. One of a number of freshwater mussels that are being considered for listing has been listed as an endangered species and resides along the Devils River and the Pecos River and along the reservoir there. So these species require a very delicate balance of high quality flow that again is sourced largely from this octafra system. And then finally, this is a source water for a substantial amount of contributions to the Rio Grande, which we manage jointly with Mexico through the International Boundaries and Water Commission. All total get enough springs. Devils River and San Felipe Springs contribute 23% of the total flow that is relied upon as firm yield for those downstream users all the way down into the Rio Grande Valley where there's a substantially irrigated agricultural economy. So any reduction in these flows could really affect those firm yields. So you've got a very interesting circumstance where you've got very complicated hydrogeology interacting with surface water, groundwater. There's a source of these surface water features. It was made more complicated still with the construction of the Anastad Reservoir. This is built back in the 60s for flood control purposes. And once it filled, we started seeing a dramatic impact on the groundwater down below beneath it. Remember, this is built on top of karst topography. So it's a really lousy reservoir, to be honest with you. So it's leaking through those rocks and actually impacting base flow up here in the Devils River. We're showing up here at Patford Crossing at the Stream Gauge. There's also a geochemical signature of that reservoir water. And it's also showing up here at San Felipe Springs. And in terms of the hydrograph, you can really see it notably here where you've got pre-reservoir conditions in the blue line there and that's the trend line about 100 CFS of average discharge. And then post-reservoir, you see really about 130, 140 CFS of average discharge. This is flow coming right out of Lake Amistad. So again, even made more complicated. If you were a water molecule, your path through the aquifer system would be rather secluded, it's rather tortuous actually. Because you could start up here in the northern part of the county as Edward's Trinity Plateau Groundwater. Discharge its base flow and flow down into the Devils River, move down into Lake Amistad, get pushed back down through the bottom of Amistad, circle back over here to the Devils River at Patford Crossing and then move back through it and perhaps go in a big circle. Or you could discharge here at San Felipe Springs, flow on to the Rio Grande River and then on down to the Gulf of Mexico. So very complex hydrogeology, very interesting situation. In terms of groundwater management, here's where it gets more interesting. There is none. There is no groundwater districts in this part of the state. This is GMA 7, those groundwater management areas I was describing. Here are all the districts that are located there, none located within Valverde County. So it's effectively unregulated. Rural capture is the only law to land there. Nonetheless, all these other districts established a desired future condition for Valverde County, namely with preservation of spring flow at San Felipe Springs. They can't manage to that. There's no means of managing to that. But the net effect of the desired future condition is we ran it through our groundwater availability models and produced a volume of water that was available from the aquifer that goes into the state water plan. And that's 50,000 acre feet. So keep that number in your mind. So in terms of future development, 50,000 acre feet of availability with only 5,000 acre feet of demand makes for a very attractive resource for others that might be looking for water. This effectively puts a bullseye on the region for others for future development. So in terms of factors to development, it's unregulated. That's really attractive to some that don't really want to mess with any sort of government interference or curtailment of your production. It's a potential target for large-scale export. In fact, the city of San Antonio, this was an article in the Texas Tribune. They were negotiating with landowners back in 2014 to put into Wellfield and pipe that water 150 miles over to San Antonio. That fell apart. They actually constructed one Wellfield 150 miles to the north. So it is a potential target for export. Extreme drought could affect flows there. Increase in irrigated agriculture. Center pivots are starting to go in along the upper Devil's River. They're directly connected to the river. And also, endangered species habitat. What was not considered in this delicate balance is that there might be 50,000 acre feet available, but we didn't look at the net effect on how that would affect base flow and these delicate habitats. And then Devil's River Whiskey. Can't forget that. This is a real thing. Devil's River Whiskey is made with Devil's River water. Slowly to be able to call it Devil's River Whiskey. So they don't use a lot of water. I thought this was just more interesting than anything. In fact, they drive a truck down from Dallas, fill it up, 12,000 gallons, ship it back and they brew a bunch of whiskey. It's more interesting than anything. Yeah. So wrapping up here, moving at a breakneck pace. Very complex hydrogeology and hydrology. Very interconnected system. No groundwater conservation districts. So it's effectively an unregulated area. Very attractive conditions for future development are likely a target. And in fact, future development could have impacts. If you, large scale development could reduce flows in the springs and also within the Devil's River, which ultimately might have an endangered species impact or impact on deliveries downstream that we've committed to with our compact with Mexico. And ultimately more science and data are needed. And our agency stepped in to produce this report just this year in December to help with our legislators because they're really wrestling with what to do with this. They've tried to create a groundwater district now for four sessions. They really can't come to grips with what they want to do. So our agency tries to step in to provide information for these kind of situations. And so I'll leave you with this. This is Valverde County. That's the Devil's River. It's one of those carbonate rocks that form these beautiful plateaus. And this is that beautiful aquamarine ribbon fed directly from that source that cuts through it. It's the only unimpounded river in the entire state. And it's in its natural condition because it's out here in the middle of nowhere. Unbelievable landscape though. So I'll leave you with that. Thank you. Well, thank you. Could I ask that all of the afternoon speakers please squeeze up there on our table. And while they're doing that, we'd just like to have a discussion, Q&A, for the last chance to really pick their brains. But I ask that you keep in mind, in addition to sort of synthesis kinds of things, what lessons learned, what do we know, be thinking about what the National Academies can do for the challenges and problems that they're facing in each of these various activities. So open it up to questions. And oh, thank you. Tom, are you still there? Yep. Wonderful. We're going to see if Carly can be a magic produce your face so you will be joining us in. Our time with this at the moment. Anyway, so okay, I'm going to get back to focusing here on names. So I got Dave Zomback and I got Dave, the double Dave. And then Mark, go ahead Dave. Okay, well very interesting, especially with the different cases and thoughts next to each other. I'm interested to get your thoughts about the challenges and the research needs and development needs around collaborations required and the data and tools needed that could help some of these collaborations. So Suzanne mentioned just big Bay and Maryland's efforts, Pennsylvania agriculture is the big contributor and things aren't going so swimmingly with respect to buy-in from the agricultural community in Pennsylvania. John, you just mentioned the Homestod Reservoir. I visited there a couple months ago and it was intrigued by the, that the reservoirs operated jointly as I understand it by Mexico and the United States. Interesting aspects to that. But there's some collaboration there and there are challenges you just went over. And you've talked about, you're trying to get a conservation district together and the challenges and that. Jay, I asked you a question earlier about the utility of the tool and you talked about its utility at the state and national scale but how that translates down and to individual ranch or county scale. And Max, you talked about different communities with limited resources and how to address those, ability to collaborate and pool. So you all touched on this theme of collaboration and I think Suzanne, you said the biggest innovation in the whole Chesapeake pay programs, the human collaboration among the seven states involved in the different agencies. So there's that political aspect to it but what can we be doing in the science and technology community to provide the kind of visualizations that Jay provided, to provide tools, mechanisms. I throw that out to all four of you. So I think there's a real pressing need. So from the university research side, I have been taking it as a challenge and I still see it as a very important challenge that we co-developed integrated water management models. We have to be sitting down at the table with the stakeholders, with the water managers, with the NGOs, government agencies. Because if we don't co-develop, we'll just sit in our offices and come up with some stuff that may not be that useful. So I think that's really important. There's a lot embedded in that, like how do you do stuff that integrates measurements, integrates satellites. It's a huge challenge. But then Suzanne, I think sort of off the ante and I agree with her 100%, that we have to be thinking not only about water, but we have to be thinking about other issues that are important in a region. So it's a big task. There are university groups and stakeholder groups, whatever that organized around, certainly around the Chesapeake Bay. And I have a bunch of colleagues at UT that have done the Texas Water Research Network and there you go, okay, awesome. You know I used to teach there, right? Did you know that? Okay. Did you take any classes for me? I didn't. Okay. So anyway, that's a big task, but I think it's really hard. So like just today, just this afternoon, Max was talking about, we're talking about irrigated acreage. And he said, so do you think it's a good number? We're doing 9 million, but what's a good number? And my answer was, you know, we need to model that and we can model it. So I'll leave it there. I'll just add to it. I'm fascinated about when I go to my primary literature and I read about stakeholder engagement. It's a very, it has a very different meaning. I reckon that John and Max and I have a very different viewpoint about what a stakeholder is and how, what stakeholder engagement is. I think we're speaking different languages. So when you read about stakeholder engagement, it's a, we have a little meeting and we listen and then we go and do our science. I frequently have University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins coming to me and saying, here are the tools that I have for you. And I asked them, well, where were you at the last Chesapeake Bay cabinet meeting? Where were you at the stormwater training session we had for our regulated community? You don't know the questions that we're asking. You go out and find stakeholders that you decide, instead of listening to the people who are really informing our needs, our regulated community, for instance. So I would challenge the scientific community to think very carefully about what that word stakeholder means and ask the decision makers if it means the same thing to them. I was just going to make a point and piggyback on, on these other points is that for this particular circumstance and for others, especially when we're grappling with how to, how to marry up surface water to groundwater. I think we need integrated models because we've invested heavily in Texas and our groundwater availability models and we have a water availability models, our whams that are the permanent agency, T.C.Q. uses, but they're totally different types of models. They weren't designed to be compatible. Our legislators have been pushing in their hearts in the right place, but they've been pushing for the games and the whams to get back together again, even though physically that's not how it works. But I think there's opportunity to couple the models and to integrate them. And so just from a technology perspective, that could be something that could be a great benefit. But this Valverde County example is a good example of where stakeholders could not get on the same page and where our agency, we're the third party unbiased providers of science and data. They really counted us to help reconcile things, which is why we're tasked with producing that report. But that's a perfect example of the Devil's River Conservancy commissioning a consultant to produce a model. The landowners in Del Rio didn't trust that model, so they hired somebody to produce their own model. And then they asked us to step in and they said, we don't trust any of these models. You guys need to step in and help reconcile all this. So I think there's a very, very important role for our agencies to not only produce the information, but we have to be able to communicate it in a way to where it really can help these stakeholders get on the same page and find common ground. So just to follow up on that. So I agree with both of you guys. And Susan, most academics are not great listeners. We're just not. And so then like the personalities become important. We have a fundamental problem in academics and that is that a lot of us stakeholder engagement isn't really rewarded. And so this is the problem. Either it's considered too applied, or you're going to produce reports, or you're going to build some integrated model, or maybe it's going to take us too long to build the model because we have to write papers. So there's like a disconnect. And I'm getting a little frustrated with it because we need to work together to make a difference. You know, we've got like a lot of smart people in there working in research and teaching. And we're not really, you know, there's a significant community that actually does want to try to make a difference, but there's no reward system in place. So you got to wait, you know, six or seven years to be able to get tenure. And yeah. So that's a separate issue that we grapple with all the time. I've been grappling with it for a while. Thank you. Thank all of you for your presentations today. I have one technical question for Suzanne. And that is, what about all those sediments behind Conowingo Dam? Because I have heard things about that. I think AP was calling me earlier, asking the same tag on question. So what's the highest and best use of that resource? Right? It's nice, highly, you know, high nutrient sediments. Man, you'd think you'd be able to figure out a high, some best use for it, but it's really expensive to remove it. And then it's really expensive to dry it out. And then it's extremely expensive to transport it. So our governor would very, very much like to get the Exelon to go ahead and move those sediments so that it can continue to trap the sediments that are continuing to come down from Lancaster County. I don't think it's economically feasible. The dam Exelon makes a pretty good argument that says, we're just a dam. We didn't put those sediments there. How should we legally be held responsible for it? So I think it's an ongoing question about, can we utilize, does it make sense to dredge out those sediments? But there's a number of people, the governor put out a request for proposal on using that resource. And to be honest, there weren't any viable takers. Okay. Just as a follow-up to that, and it does deal with your quest for us to look at this in terms of the board. I was talking with Bruce Babbitt, former Secretary of Interior a couple of weeks ago, over the use of science and policy. Bruce's, Max probably knows, who was appointed by the former governor to try to bring together an approach to develop, then called the California Waterfix Bay Delta. It's had so many names. I can't keep all straight. We keep changing names hoping that we'll move forward. But what Bruce said to me is that through the years, and it's been multiple years, there's been a, what's that? Thirty years. A culture of crisis has been created. And he's all, these are calling for developing a compact, order compact for the state to see if yet another policy could solve this problem. My question for all of you is your perspective on the use of science in developing public policy. We can't do it all. We embrace this concept of adaptive management. I track 30 adaptive management across the country. Few of them actually work. I can probably put on one hand, those that really work and have achieved what it was intended to. I would like to get your perspective on what you think and how we should move forward. This is Tom. I like the way in a little bit here. So this concept of adaptive management, and I agree it's difficult to see where that's actually working, but in order to be adaptive, you have to actually collect data. And one of the points that was made today is that we have all kinds of problems and we can never collect enough data. And from my perspective, one of the places that science can weigh in as they can help. And I think Suzanne alluded to this, right? You can't monitor everything and you can't evaluate everything. You simply don't have the resources to do that, but you can do it in a scientifically defensible way. What types of projects, what proportion of those projects, for example, would you monitor and based on those findings, is that going to feed back into a regulation change or some type of management action? I don't think we do enough of that because again, I don't think that academics in general are engaged in the stakeholder process to the same degree that maybe that Suzanne's group, as she envisions it. So I think we have to be a little more assertive in that regard and think about what types of contributions scientists might be able to make as they kind of endeavor to kind of work in a policy or regulatory arena. I'll just add to that. You know, long time ago when I was in graduate school, I was taught that scientists stay on the outside and they don't get involved in decision-making because that puts our objectivity in question and I get that and it's time to get involved. We need objective thinkers in decision-making processes and I'm not ashamed as a scientist to step up to leadership and get involved and I would challenge all of you to be involved in decision-making. I would say that the Chesapeake Bay Program is built on the foundation of the Science and Technical Advisory Committees and they are specifically answering questions that come down starting from the EPA but working through the states, asking specific science-based questions about policy implications and tools, developing tools to implement our policy. So I'm optimistic. I've lived and worked in a state that banned climate change and I've lived and worked in a state that said... Wait, you banned it but you don't have it anymore? ...that they were going to ban sea level rise. I was part of the commission that reversed that as a scientist. So I do think it's valid to get involved. I do think you have to be careful about your credibility and find that balance but science is a crucial component and it's also important to elevate some of our other sciences. Our social sciences are economics that really determine the decision. I know we want to think decisions are made based on objective science. More often it's economics and political sociological controls. So make sure you understand those and you're not disappointed when one maybe less than optimized scientific approach is taken versus another. Let me add on to that because my answer is going to be I think we need more collaboration between scientists and economists. I know some economists think of themselves as scientists but seriously because when push comes to shove in regulation or even when legislatures are looking at forming policy people who care about these issues want to know what the trade-offs are on the science. They want to understand, okay, we do this. What's the likelihood of whether this fish species or this terrestrial species will survive, et cetera, et cetera. But of course then you always get people coming in and saying, well, it's going to cost too much or the cost shouldn't be allocated this way or that way. And really to have a full picture you need all of that information and it needs to be integrated to use your words to them because what's often difficult and we're finally beginning to work on in California is so often we make these sort of point in time estimates. Well, here's what we think. Maybe here's 20 years that someone picked a discount rate and here's what it looks like. That's just not good enough anymore. We need more dynamic looks at, well, what if we have a lower discount rate because climate change is real? And what about second and third order effects? Often we look at, okay, this project or this regulation comes in and this is what will happen but actually that will happen and then people will react to something happening and so on and so forth and you have to draw the lines around the box somewhere but I think we really need sort of a more dynamic look. And the last thing I'll say about this is for too long in California and I'll only speak for California here, water resource decisions have been made by engineers. Now, I like engineers but engineers are not necessarily people who were taught sort of traditionally anyway decades ago are not necessarily making decisions that really take in the broad spectrum of all factors that we should be looking at in society. So I'll leave it at that. I would add to the economists, people study communications. I think the idea that policymakers can come to scientists and expect to get clear answers, there's a group of people who study communications and it's a discipline like any other and that is a group that needs to be part of the mix and to sort of get provocative, the National Academy doesn't include social scientists. So it's not just the policymakers and the scientists not talking to each other but even at our highest levels we're not necessarily respecting certain disciplines and the social sciences as disciplines and those folks have a lot to say about policy. So I'm going to take chairs prerogative here as an economist and perhaps one of the few social scientists in the room integrated and a member of the National Academy of Sciences so they do in fact economists and some social sciences. However you are correct that there's nowhere near enough. Anyway, I was actually going to wait till the end to ask this question but it's been too perfect as part of the conversation because you've been talking about integrated modeling and I think some of the earlier conversation about integrated assessment modeling was about groundwater and surface water or 3D water or water and land systems and I'm very interested and have done work with ecologists, hydrologists and others on integrating economic models directly with things like the National Water Model would be really cool things like we've done work with the soil and water assessment tool to make those linkages all the way downstream. So I was going to ask if you all thought there was need for more of that sort of work and if you thought there was anything the academies could do in that arena. And of course NSF has had a strong funding partnership and providing support in their integrated modeling with social sciences. So if you felt like you've already said what you have to say fine we'll move on but if you have any more thoughts and welcome additional comments. I never met a microphone I didn't like. So I think it's critically important that we do more of the... and so speaking from the water perspective we don't really do a lot of integrating with economics and it's really to our detriment because a lot of the work that we want to do if we could put some kind of a value on it we would be able to make a lot more progress in underscoring the importance of whatever some new kind of flood protection or some new kind of recharge feature or something like that. There's a great need it's a super challenge so I think there's lots of room for an academy type study. One of the challenges that I think about when I think about trying to integrate that into model, include that in integrated models is that predicting human behavior. So we think about say just water and climate change. It's really hard to predict how people might behave in the future. How are people going to respond to... how are farmers going to respond to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2036. I mean it's really hard to know how is it going to be going in 2030. How do you get this into your model really hard? So a lot of rich area and a lot of... I think a lot of thought needs to go into how to do it. So I'm going to trumpet the model of how our agency works just to show you how it incorporates sort of a financial piece of all this. I don't know if you're all familiar with the Texas Water Development Board, but it's a unique agency, unique to anything else that I know of in the country. But it's sort of half of a research institute that is actually also part of a state agency and half of a bank. And it really follows sort of a three-tiered process where my office, Office of Water Science and Conservation, we collect the data, we provide the information that supports state water planning. Projects are identified through this bottoms-up regional water planning process to provide for long-term supply. And then we have financial programs, namely through what's called the SWIV, State Water Infrastructure for Texas Fund, where $2 billion were carved out of, ironically termed the Rainy Day Fund in Texas, which was oil and gas reserves that were sort of stocked away revenue. And that $2 billion was leveraged to what we anticipate to be some 50-something billion dollars worth of projects. So we couple up the science and the data and the information with supporting that planning process. And then when it comes to funding a process or a project, then we have to make sure that we have to understand the financial risk to the agency because we're using Texas' taxpayer dollars to finance these projects. So we've got a very robust Office of Financial Analyst that really dig in, look at these cost-benefit analyses and make sure that these are viable projects. And then on the prioritization side of things, on the planning side, we have to prioritize these projects. And so the economics of them, the finance is incorporated into all of that. So it's a very interesting model just on the water supply side of things where science is the foundation for planning that ultimately provides the funding for projects. I just want to quickly add that when I talk to my scientific colleagues, when you think economics, you generally tend to think taxes. And there's this whole other community of taxes. The opposite of taxes. There's this whole other community out there called business. And they have something to gain. They have something to invest. And in fact, some of our greatest conservation wins have been in collaboration and cooperation with business. So please don't forget the private sector when we think about economics and their willingness, whether it's green investing or just straight-up beneficial support of water supply and anything else that they want to know, they want to be involved. Yeah, we've got several more still in queue here. Well, I'm not, you know, I'm troubled by today's. I mean, obviously our groundwater's precious resource is limited. It's clearly we're not managing it well. And even where we have good programs, John, your last comment in that area, you said four times to try to get a water conservation and just doesn't seem to stick and it just, I mean, I'm wondering then from the Academy, is there a need to kind of what would be the elements that's necessary that we would have management programs that would recognize this precious resource and need to have the kinds of controls over that. And it seems to be, and we've got several different examples. They're all very different and with varying levels of success, frankly, by the evaluating it. Actually, probably from Jay's analysis, none of you are succeeding. You're just, you have a plan failure, right? So from the discussion, maybe you look at what would be the elements of program that you lack as you would really like to have to be able to have the right kind of controls or management over, particularly groundwater systems. I think the surface waters, maybe it's the lack of visibility. Acknowledgements, do we need a silent spring for groundwater? That idea comes to mind. Maybe that's the role of academies can be this alarm bell, but I think it's, I'm very troubled anyway. Help me out. One thing that comes to mind is the need for national water policy and that includes both surface and groundwater. And again, I think the view from the top shows the bottom up and the top down. Are we done? Is that what that means? Sorry. So the bottom up view and the top down view, right? It's the same view. It's not working. It's not working. We're trying, but, you know, we're on a collision course. And so it's a ward off that course. We need to have national level discussions. And it's really difficult to do because groundwater is sort of state by state, right? River basins are river basins and we really sort of go to the great lakes, like stay away from the great lakes. And it's really, really difficult to have that kind of discussion. But it's exactly what's needed. I don't know how to accomplish that. Maybe it's a, you know, or Academy report on the need for national, is there a need for national water policy? And so what would that look like? What would you, you were looking for a day? Well, I was just about to say. So I don't listen. I don't think the, uh, the ranchers out in Valverde County would really care what the federal policy on water is. Um, what really what I've seen inspire more active groundwater management in Texas. They're very independent lot is there has to be a real threat that's something that is theirs could be taken away from them. It's like that quote from that attorney in that, that thirsty land book is that if I'm pumping in its mind, but if you're pumping it, it's ours. And they, they really believe that. And I saw it in Hayes County. There was a threat of a big project that was going to ship water off to the big city. They got motivated and created groundwater district that next session. The reason that there's been bills filed in Valverde counties because San Antonio was in negotiation with well owners to move water to San Antonio, to from Valverde County to San Antonio. I had to say it, but there has to be on the very local scale, there has to be a threat for that rancher to actually get behind something like this. I don't think they would be that inspired by a national water policy. Be frank. One thought here, I mean, we always like to talk about multiple benefits scenarios and how to, you know, sort of improve conditions generally. But the reality is no matter what we do, they're going to be losers. That, that's, that is the reality that a lot of people don't necessarily want to engage with. But, you know, one possible scenario here, I wouldn't necessarily call the report, who are the losers and what we can do about them. But, but, you know, to really look at, you know, over time, assuming, you know, different climate scenarios play out and the overall dependence on groundwater, at least in the southern half of the U.S. continues to grow, what, what can might we expect? I know it is hard to predict human behavior, but to at least be able to say these industries, these types of agriculture in these places are going to see declines. What does that mean in terms of food production, in terms of, you know, the transfers of water in our basin and to really try to map that out? Because that's not something I've seen done. I'm trying not to, I just have to answer, sorry. I mean, I have to say everyone a little bit again as an economist. So first of all, it's hard to predict human behavior, but we know very well when prices go up, people buy less. We know very well when there's scarcity and markets have to readjust. There are some winners and losers and we have a lot of methods and tools for estimating fine demands, elasticities and all that sort of jazz that you heard when you were in Econ 1 that we, what economists, is their daily bread and butter. And so those are exactly the kind of models that if we link more closely with the kind of models that you're developing and talking about, we can do scenarios. So suppose this is what happens. Suppose we have a rule that requires, that doesn't allow us to move water from these reservoirs to San Antonio. What does that mean? What if we do? Who are the gainers? What are the sizes? And we can also go to that next step to say, let's design policies to think about how to, once we do that, be sure that the biggest winners compensate the losers. And so that is entirely what people like me do and think about all day long. So that's just, you know, I think we're hearing sort of very strongly that there's some pieces here that could perhaps be added. The other thing I will just say there was, there have been studies, a national water policy and planning has been something that the Corps of Engineers was involved with. The Academy has done reports through the Water Science and Technology Board, sometimes at the bequest of behest of administrations, the Council on Environmental Quality. There was a report 10 or 15 years ago. So the need is known, but it has to have the political will to actually want to do it. And that's kind of, kind of where we are now, but that's just sort of a bit of a historical perspective, but really very rich conversation. Okay. So I have, we just had Mark and now he's happy. He's calm. He's been taken care of. We'll check him off the list. Okay. Now, now we got, we got a dozen questions from Nusha before we go to Carl, Ingrid and John. Can I say something? Certainly I'm sorry, please chime in. I've just been listening to the conversation and it's an interesting one. And I'm going to circle back to what science can do and how they might, you know, inform policy or management. And so we've talked about models and making them more integrative. That means they're more complicated and there's more uncertainty associated with them. And as, as an ecologist, right? One of the things that, that I've always tried to do is, is to investigate processes, general processes that kind of govern the systems that I'm interested in working in. And when we write papers, you know, we, we often get them thrown back at us because it's not a general enough interest, right? But the problem from a management or regulatory arena is we don't manage for the general, right? We manage for the very, very specific. And so what we have to do, if we, as a scientific body, I think if we're creating these more complex models, we need to downscale them, whether they're, you know, a groundwater model, you know, from satellites or a climate model, or if they're integrating economics and all kinds of things. And I don't think we do a very good job of that appreciating what the general model might look like. Are we making that the tools available for people to take that general model, kind of downscale it and use it for the particular purpose, reduce the uncertainty. I think there's some, some real opportunities there with scientific community to kind of be engaged in those types of discussions. So anyways, I just want to point that out. Thank you. Nisha, how about one question? Let's see if we can, in the next, I'm just going to point out that it's almost 10 to five. And I'm sure we would all like to get out of here a little, not too much after five. So everybody can just try to keep it within a, two to three minutes for each conversation. I tried. If you would have taken me first, I would have been done. No, I didn't have 12 questions at the beginning. I'll say a few things. Actually, one is building up on your comments. I'm a recovering engineer and I call myself a recovering engineer because I have four engineering degrees. And then I went and worked for an economist for four years, learned the rope of beyond econ 101, how economists work. And then I worked for the legislature in California for a year and worked on all the national, sorry, regional and statewide water policies, I learned tons and then ended up on the regional board. So basically I called myself recovering because I learned how different groups think and then try to bring it back to academia, which sort of ties the comment that Jay made, which is does academia really value something like that? Not necessarily, right? It's not conventional. They don't know where you to put you. Which box do you belong? Right? So is it, are you a civil engineer or an economist or a 5% or is there something in between? No, there's no such thing. So that actually highlights the challenge of academia because if you want to engage, then brings the whole concept of how do you engage? Because if you don't know public policy, you don't know where to come in. If you don't know economics the way that it works, you don't know how your ideas sort of add up to an economic value. And I think the biggest failure of all time from my point of view is this whole concept of economy with scale, which is killing us because everything is about economy of a scale. We build these dams because they were supposed to fit in economy of a scale. The problem is they last only so long and we still think about the economy of a scale but not thinking what is that scale? Are we talking about time as a scale? As are we thinking like 30 years, 40 years from now, who is going to pay for a lot of these things? That goes back to the earlier comment about Florida and all the projects that are in place and really makes me worried because actually we have been in the past five years trying to look at water demand and where it's going and the reality is even though we think we can predict what humans would do and how they behave, we actually do have a lot of data and some modeling capacity to look at how people would behave when you communicate better with them. If they have to deal with crisis in different points, we look at Los Angeles. In the past 50 years they have used the same amount of water the population doubled and they still have so long to go and so much to do. So it's kind of like it is actually, we actually are not that far from being able to see how people behave under various circumstances. The problem is we have this old top-down model. We think we know what's going on, we think we want to do this and this and this. It's easier not to, the reality is easier to not have stakeholders involved as much because they have a lot of opinions and ideas and who wants that. So it's an issue and then on a consultant, I know a few of my colleagues here are consultants and no hard-filling on that but the fact is when we were dealing with the Groundwater Management Act in California, the first few meetings we hosted at Stanford was populated by all the consultants because they have never done groundwater modeling and they wanted to see what a university has to offer. Then they can just go back quickly, build a groundwater model, that way they can actually be able to get all these jobs by these water districts to be able to give them, you know, provide services which is important but also the lack of academic involvement in that area is very important. And then last one is Suzanne, I think going back to your comments on the regional monitoring, I wanted to say we actually in California, in Bay Area, we have this regional monitoring program that is actually built to deal with water quality in the Bay and it's funded by the wastewater treatment plants and has been quite successful. I would love to see how our regional monitoring program parsed with yours or learn and one last thing about the comments you made about financing. We haven't been talking about financing enough, it is a topic that's not looked at enough by academia because everybody thinks we already know how it works, the reality is we don't know enough and I actually command a lot of the work that because of Chesapeake Bay has been happening here on trading water quality, on impact investment, on, you know, local fees or rates that has been sort of impacting the way people behave with stormwater on public-private community-based, public-private partnership. There are so many different ways you can finance these projects and we are not doing enough of it because we still think top-down government. Yeah, it's not sustainable. And on that trading, I have somehow been put in charge of managing a market for water quality trading. It's blowing my mind. So I will accept any help from any source on water quality trading. I have some ideas, but I have a lot more questions. There is an academic model out there. Kathy, you might remember if anybody works in an ag-based environment, extension. Extension is the model for academia that reaches out and listens. So that's it. Okay, we made it. Nobody even responded to my call. Ingrid and John. And then we're done for the day. Okay, this has been a wonderful conversation and I think it got started by Suzanne's comments about, you know, being involved in stakeholder engagement. And I think it ties in with what Jay said about academia and what you brought up and what Dave was talking about a bit on what we do at NSF as providing the carrot. So I will toot the horn for the National Academy study for the Grand Challenges of Environmental Engineering. The fifth Grand Challenge is to better inform stakeholders. We presented this work at our biannual conference for the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors. It was fun. It was emotional. There was a professor who got up and basically said they were doing this years ago and had difficulty in their career. It was very emotional. But what it really, I think, dramatized was that as engineers we have to start understanding that our wonderful technologies will not be adopted if they are not part of the solution. And so what NSF has recognized this with a lot of our science, for many, many years we have had the requirement of having broader impacts. You have to have that. It is a co-equal assessment of the merit of the project. If you don't, you will not get funded. That's a pretty big carrot for an academic. Second, we have a very, very large carrot in engineering in the engineering research centers. A member of your board, for example, is involved with Renuit. Renuit has been one of the very successful engineering research centers that has brought into the water sphere. The absolute requirement that social sciences have to be involved in it. That has served as quite a model at NSF. And what we call Gen 4 on the ERCs has been this idea of convergence and convergence is a deep integration across disciplinary boundaries. It is not a chemical engineer working with a civil engineer. It is a chemical engineer working with maybe a dance instructor and somebody who does archaic languages and things like that. And that has propagated itself to many, many, many cross-directorate and cross-divisional initiatives at NSF. One I have been involved with this was navigating the new Arctic. And navigating the new Arctic had an absolute requirement. We had a wonderful project that was working with 20 different communities up in the Arctic. It didn't get funded because it wasn't social science. It was just engagement. And so that is what we had these absolute requirements that you had to do it. Otherwise you don't get funded. So that is what I would say is that there is a recognition now that there is a lot of funding to be had if you do that. If you work with your colleagues and when I say talking to your colleagues it is not down the hall, it is across campus. So no question there I am sorry. That is NSF. And your colleagues are in government and in private nonprofit sector as well. So I guess what I was going to ask is related to what a lot of you have been already talking about. Suzanne talked about and you talked and Carol did too about scientists not really engaging with real stakeholders. I mean in the broader impact they say I have these stakeholders but they are waiting until the last minute to really go and engage and you have already gone through your meetings. So there is not that real engagement. And as scientists we were not taught to really make decisions. We are told to really stay away which it is something that has happened quite a bit. And can mention on the communication part we are not really trained to be communicators. We are not trained to go to the congress and say hey we need to make this policy. And Kathy brought up the issue of modeling which has been brought up in different aspects. And it is a complex topic by itself because there are so many models how to integrate them. But Kathy brought up particularly the one on economy. And I wanted to ask on the role of education and training in the long term in putting these things together for better informed policy and groundwater management. And it is not about training in groundwater because we do that already. It is training about this multi disciplinary aspects that have to do with economy and impacts and stakeholders. And not training in terms of like oh I am going to put it in the proposal so I get funded. It is like really I understand what the problem is. So I wanted to ask what you thought about the importance of that role of education and training in the long term. And maybe that is something that should be thought of by the national academies. So in some sense you are preaching to the choir. And of course we think that is important. I don't really know how to do it. I think that NSF has the appropriate training program so I have been out of that loop for some time. But like I said I heard and years ago you have to be pretty old to remember the GRT program. So I think that is great. My approach to that training has been to just entrain my students and drag them along with me when I try to do different things. So I used to go visit Dave all the time. He used to know all of my students when he was working for Congresswoman Napolitano. And so anything like that we would bring the students along and so it is an integral part of education. Understanding how to communicate with policymakers. Understanding how to listen and engage with stakeholders is part of moving towards better groundwater management. Better resource management. So you could imagine that being part of a special call or something at NSF and again my only insight into how to do it was to drag my experience was to drag my students along with me as I tried to figure out what to do. But we can't really make any progress unless we try to have the training programs and try to bring the students along with us. I think and I'll let John and Max jump in but get mentor them. And it needs to be us that mentors. Get them out for a semester. Have them come work for us in between degrees. Have them go work for a congress person or a senator. Get them out of science. I think it's really important that they get out in the real world and really understand why and who makes decisions. And also Mark I've been sitting here worrying about you. I am extremely optimistic and there is this model the Chesapeake Bay thing it worked. It's working. It's messy it's complicated. I'm sure we spent too much money. And it worked. So don't for a minute lose hope that this can all come together. It ain't pretty but it can come together. I think the source of my concern was that at the end of the day after relying on the science to save us. But that's probably the right. We're scientists. We're scientists. Nothing that is stiftering. There you go. John, you get the last question and then we'll do and we'll have a two minute wrap up after that to end. And I'm channeling Mark a little bit here. It's kept me up at night and I'm not sure that it should but we exist in a paradigm where surface water and groundwater are treated generally separately. Water quality, water quality quantity separate and that's how our policies are set up, our government, our agencies are set up, etc. And if we look further down the road, is this model on its way to breaking? And should we be looking at something different? And what does that look like to you? Yes. I think the model is breaking. And you know, I won't say that we are that far down the road to fixing it but at least in California now we've put all of those functions under one roof, so to speak. So at least there exists the possibility for the people who do the water quality to talk to the drinking water people, to talk to the surface water rights people and try to work together. Forcing people to work together is never easy and whether that's in academia or in government or anywhere else necessity will get us there. I'm not sure how we get there faster than necessity demands. But if I had the magic wand A, there would be, to be blunt about it less local control, there would be more state control the stakes are too high and the state always is the provider of last resort when bad things happen. And so I think we sort of need to get to the place and this probably wouldn't resonate as well in Texas, but where there is an understanding of the value of regulation and regulation that tries to hit on sort of multi-dimensional criteria. So it's not we're just regulating for that one water quality goal. We're trying to incorporate a whole bunch of different things but to do that you do need a higher level of centralization and planning that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But I'm a regulator so every hammer is a nail. Anybody else want to chime in before we I have the final hammer here so let's let's end it there. First of all let's a full round of thanks for the channel and this afternoon this is an incredibly rich day. I don't know about the rest of you but my head is spinning and I'm still going to process and spend some more time processing so I just want to and by saying thank you all the the big heavy lifting on organizing a day like this is people like Elizabeth Stephanie and Laura and our Carly and Brendan the staff folks here so I really want to appreciate them this is a lot of work and it came together beautifully so thank you very very much for doing that so with that I think we will end there is a plan for a board dinner so I'm going to let Elizabeth just mention that and then go relax and join thank you again all of you for such an engaging day really excellent thanks everyone it really was a rich day I appreciate all of the contributions throughout and your fortitude and staying in so 5.15 that's great so the board members the dinner starts at 6 a couple of you who are from out of town have been invited to join us to the dinner if you're able to do that and we will see hopefully many of you tomorrow morning starting at around 30 or again whenever the spirit moves you there are agendas back there for the day tomorrow we'll have a number of interesting presentations so I hope that some of you can join us again tomorrow so thanks everyone