For the people that live in the desert and are concerned about the long term drought and lack of water, like me, this could be great news! 

Researchers used 1 million data points and a machine learning algorithm to estimate groundwater stores with higher resolution than ever before. And it paid off with some promising water news. 

Reed Maxwell, a hydrologist at Princeton University, likes to think of rainfall, snow, and surface water as a checking account used for short-term water management needs and groundwater as a savings account, where a larger sum should, ideally, be building up over time.

“We’re operating in a situation where we don’t know how much is going into the savings account every month, and we don’t know how much is in our savings account,” he said.

But a new groundwater map by Maxwell and colleagues offers the highest-resolution estimate so far of the amount of groundwater in the contiguous United States: about 306,500 cubic kilometers. That’s 13 times the volume of all the Great Lakes combined, almost 7 times the amount of water discharged by all rivers on Earth in a year. This estimate, made at 30-meter resolution, includes all groundwater to a depth of 392 meters, the deepest for which reliable porosity data exist. 

In addition to identifying groundwater quantities at high resolution, the new map reveals more nuanced information about known groundwater sources.

Now… How do we get it to the surface and fill up Lake Mead again?