Researchers from Princeton and the University of Arizona have released the highest-resolution map of US groundwater to date. They have estimated that a total of 306,500 cubic kilometers of groundwater is available - 13 times the capacity of all the Great Lakes combined. Using a machine learning algorithm and more than one million data points, the team mapped water depth at a 30-meter resolution across the contiguous US.
Key datapoints from this analysis include:
- Total Volume: The contiguous US holds roughly 306,500 cubic kilometers of groundwater.
- Depth Reach: The estimate includes groundwater above a depth of 392 meters.
- Shallow Tables: Approximately 40% of the land analyzed has a water table shallower than 10 meters, where water directly interacts with surface plants.
- Human Impact: The AI model successfully identified and incorporated historical signals of human pumping and depletion.
Previous models using 100-kilometer resolution underestimated groundwater reserves by roughly 18%. By providing data at a 30-meter resolution, this map offers a significantly more accurate calculation of US groundwater resources compared to past satellite-based or well-only estimations.
Read the full groundwater research paper here OR access the models outputs here.
