My, how the last two trimesters have flown by! But now that they're over, that means I can start on my Senior Research Project (hereafter: SRP), which, as you can probably tell by my title, is about rainwater harvesting (in Flagstaff, Arizona)! The main focus question I'm trying to answer with this project is if residents of Flagstaff are able to collect enough rainwater from their roofs to make up for predicted water/ precipitation shortages and continue their current way of life. As Flagstaff is not sustained by the Colorado River, rainwater and yearly precipitation is crucial to the city's water supply! I'll be looking at predictions, water usage data, roof areas of a chosen neighborhood, and several other things that have slipped my mind at the moment (yes, my adoring fans, I know agonizing to not know). I will provide links or citations to the things I'll discuss so you can explore it as well!
First of all, from this week's research I first discovered that the average amount of water (for all commercial, industrial, and residential needs) used per person per day in Flagstaff is 112 gallons. Residents and visitors combined drink approximately three billion gallons of drinking water per year. Holy guacamole! Three billion! If all of that water was in one place, I would say that the Water Nation had risen! I suppose the real question now is how many cows could get utterly stuck in that much water?! (Hehe get it? ... Utterly, ha! I crack myself up). Anywho, pushing forward with the stats, as of about the past week (since January, 29th 2015 that is) the average total consumption is 43.648 million gallons per week and 91.51 gallons per capita per day. Upper Lake Mary, an important source of water for Flagstaff, is approximately 22.7 ft. deep. (the links I got these rad stats from are provided: http://www.flagstaff.az.gov/index.aspx?nid=1275 and http://flagstaff.az.gov/index.aspx?NID=31). As these pages are from the city's website, they will have links that provide other information I have collected.
I am going to select a specific neighborhood and use Google Earth to measure each rooftop. I will choose an area from the map that best represents average Flagstaff homes (on the map, I'm considering either "Flagstaff Townsite" or "Fox Glenn"). From the measurements, I'll calculate how much rainwater a roof can collect in cm (or inches depending on how the city measures rain. Probably in the metric system because THIS IS SCIENCE!). Well, according to my father (don't worry, I will get the exact source), for ever inch of rain that falls per 1000 square feet of roof, you can collect 600 gallons of water. For our personal water collecting system at home, just one storm can fill up all four of our smaller tanks (will get exact gallons) and a significant amount of our 1000 gallon tank. I'd say that's pretty neat and it makes it super easy and feasible for almost anybody to collect a substantial amount of water. As an interesting thing to add, here is the link to my father's little debut where he discusses our system: http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2014/09/02/12-news-harvesting-rainwater/14994903/.
Finally, I'd like to include some statistics about the Colorado River Basin. Even though it doesn't apply to Flagstaff, this water source provides for millions of people throughout several states, and if there will be shortages as predicted, it will have a huge impact on many people. First, the Colorado River itself provides water to 40 million people and irrigates nearly 5.5 million acres of land. Second, it is a crucial water source for at least 22 federally recognized tribes, 7 National Wildlife Refuges, 4 National Recreation Areas, and 11 National Parks. (http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/programs/crbstudy/finalreport/Executive%20Summary/CRBS_Executive_Summary_FINAL.pdf)
Well this concludes my very first SRP post (ever!) and though it was mostly background spiel, I am hoping to go into more detail and specific activities later on and get an exact estimate on the predicted shortages.
Farewell for now and thanks for reading!
-Lia
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