Water Conservation on the Supply Side, Using Underground Water Storage Systems

With continuing population increases, society's demands for water will also increase. Most governmental agencies are expanding their consumer-based water conservation programs, as an important way of meeting these increased, future demands. With global warming increasing evaporation rates, avoiding evaporative losses with future water storage projects is also a significant step in "supply-side", water conservation. Evaporative losses from surface water storage reservoirs are function of local evaporative rates and the reservoir's effective depth. Based on this study, approximately 20% additional surface storage capacity would be required to account for the evaporative losses throughout these fourteen states. Avoiding evaporative losses by storing water underground can be accomplished by a variety of traditional methods, as well as a new method of underground water storage.