Giant magnet hanging from a helicopter could solve California's drought water shortages
As California alternates between drought and flood, water managers are trying to harness the floodwaters and store it for drought years. The big magnet is just the help they needed.
Storing the Golden State's extra water
Inside look at how California is planning to fight against the next drought.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane … no it’s a giant electromagnet that dwarfs the helicopter that it hangs from. The enormous hoop, flying about 200 feet off the ground, that looks like a something out of a fantasy or sci-fi movie, will actually help California during the next drought. The huge magnet can "see" 1,500 feet through the ground similar to a superhero.
"This system images down to about 1,500 feet down, and it looks for the soils down there and it tells us whether or not we've got some sand or clay down there," Aaron Fukuda, General Manager of the Tulare Irrigation District told FOX Weather.
(California Department of Water Resources / FOX Weather)
"That gets flown over the ground and there's a transmitter at the front and a receiver in the back. It sends a signal down out of the front, measures the time delay to the back of the system," he continued. "That measures the resistance of the soil and that resistance is turned into a soil classification, sand or clay."
The California Department of Water Resources compares the equipment to an MRI, "looking" below the skin at the human body.
Fukuda and other water managers are looking for aquifers and a way to refill them.
A giant electromagnet hanging from a helicopter.
(Aaron Fukuda/Tulare Irrigation District / FOX Weather)
What is an aquifer?
Below the surface are huge, natural underwater reservoirs and rivers called aquifers. The groundwater in aquifers feed wells and springs used for drinking water and irrigation. According to one scientist who studies groundwater, underground water storage is three times greater than current reservoir storage in the state.
Groundwater supplies the state with 40% of water in non-drought years and 60% of water to farms and cities during drought.
"We've been using that (groundwater) over the development of the state of California, and we've been over-drafting it, meaning we've been taking out more than we've been putting in," Aaron Fukuda, General Manager of the Tulare Irrigation District told FOX Weather
This cracked, dry reservoir bed in Northern California looks like most around the state in the third year of drought.
(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Rain and snowmelt recharge or refill the aquifers. But history shows that California’s climate is feast or famine with water which further depletes the underground storage during dry years. Wet years result in devastating floods.
"On average, California receives about 200 million acre-feet of water per year in the form of rain and snow. However, we rarely experience an average year," explained the California Department of Water Resources' website. "California has the most variable weather conditions in the nation, often fluctuating between extreme drought and extreme flood."
California alternates between drought and flood
Just review highlights from the past four years as evidence. The state suffered a three-year drought with the driest January and February in recorded history in 2022. Then the past winter was an about-face, with a parade of atmospheric river-fueled storms unleashing massive floods and the greatest snowpack in state history.
RIDICULOUS PHOTOS SHOW AFTERMATH OF 12 FEET OF SNOW IN CALIFORNIA'S SIERRA NEVADA
File: MAMMOTH LAKES, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 29: Homeowner Jeff Wright checks on his neighbor's home in the Sierra Nevada mountains, near snow piled up from new and past storms.
(Mario Tama / Getty Images)
70 FEET OF SNOW HAS FALLEN IN THE WEST THIS SEASON. HOW TALL IS THAT REALLY?
But not all that water and snowmelt recharges the aquifers. Take a look at Tulare Lake, the ghost lake that was drained 100 years ago now reappearing.
About 4 million live on the land that was converted to farms and ranches in the early 1900s, according to the California Department of Water Resources. Levees and dams cut off the Southern Sierra snowpack water source for the seasonal lake, but recent snowmelt filled it again.
SNOW CONSIDERED CRUCIAL TO LONG-TERM DROUGHT MITIGATION
LEMOORE, CALIF. - MAR. 21, 2023 Tulare Lake, a body of water that was largely drained more than 100 years ago, has been filling up after a series of powerful storms that have struck California this winter.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images)
Divert floodwater to help in times of drought
Diverting flood water and snowmelt is one of Fukuda’s goals in order to make the state's groundwater sustainable.
‘ASTRONOMICAL’ WESTERN SNOW IS NOW MELTING BUT NOT FLOWING WHERE WATER MANAGERS NEED IT
A diagram using the technology that shows recharge sites in yellow at the surface. The blue is clay that impedes water flow.
(Aaron Fukuda / Tulare Irrigation District / FOX Weather)
"As we saw this year, the earlier atmospheric rivers that came through (and) that water comes off the Sierra Nevada's very fast," he said. "So we've got to capture it fast, get it underground very fast. They only do that through the sandy soil. So that's what we're mapping out, the sands and the clays, and concentrating our recharge efforts over that sandy area."
Fine-grained clay, while being a porous sediment, is the least permeable and is an aquitard, impeding the flow of water, according to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. So water can get into clay’s pours, but the pours are not connected, so the water does not flow.
The ground on the left is non-porous, the middle is porous but not permeable and on the right is the sample that allows water to flow through the grains.
(University of Colorado Denver / FOX Weather)
You can think of digging a hole on the beach and the water permeates through the sand to fill the hole. Clay pots hold water.
Refilling or recharging groundwater as well as aquifers requires water to flow, permeability. A study of the area published in Environmental Research Letters states that ice from the end of the last glacial period carved out the valleys then melt filled them with sand and gravel. One aquifer the authors found was over a mile wide and 12 miles long about 100 feet underground.
The Tulare Irrigation District paired with Stanford University about 8 years ago to map more aquifers and recharge areas.
CALIFORNIA TO DEAL WITH SOME SNOWMELT FLOODING BY DIVERTING WATER
Part of the "loop" that sends and receives electromagnetic pulses to map the subsurface.
(Aaron Fukuda / Tulare Irrigation District / FOX Weather)
"In a big wet year like this, we're taking that surface water, and we're putting it into the groundwater system so that we can save it for other drought years," Fukuda said. "We can pump it out and use it later on. We're using the groundwater system like a big reservoir underneath us."
He said that this is one of the first years his district has been able to divert groundwater.
RELENTLESS CALIFORNIA ATMOSPHERIC RIVER DROPS 32 TRILLION GALLONS OF WATER OVER 3 WEEKS
California using helicopters to measure groundwater from the sky
California is using airborne, electromagnetic instruments attached to helicopters to measure the groundwater from the sky.
The state passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014, which require local water agencies to develop and implement groundwater sustainability plans by 2040. So other districts use the same technology as well.