Report On Sea Level Rise And Ground Water Extraction
There is a news article from the University of Utrecht [thanks to Erik for alerting us to this!] titled
Rising sea levels attributed to global groundwater extraction
The article starts with the text
“Large-scale groundwater extraction for irrigation, drinking water or industry results in an annual rise in sea levels of approximately 0.8 mm, accounting for about one-quarter of total annual sea-level rise (3.1 mm). According to hydrologists from Utrecht University and the research institute Deltares, the rise in sea levels can be attributed to the fact that most of the groundwater extracted ultimately winds up in the sea. The hydrologists explain their findings in an article to be published in the near future in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.”
The article is based on the paper
Y. Wada, L.P.H. van Beek, C.M. van Kempen, J.W.T.M. Reckman, S. Vasak, and M.F.P. Bierkens (2010), Global depletion of groundwater resources, Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2010GL044571, in press.
This is yet another paper that shows the interconnection among the components of the climate system. The attribution of a climate effect (in this case sea level rise) to just one cause (e.g. ocean warming and glacial melt due to positive radiative forcing from anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is too narrow of a perspective.
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What else causes this?
Willem:
A couple of years ago in Science, a couple of scientists published the results of their very detailed study into the effects of the impoundment of water behind newly built dams on sea level over the last hundred years. I don’t have access to it now, but the basic result was that the plot of reduction in sea level rise looked like an upside-down “V” over the past century, peaking in mid-century at about 1.0mm/year.
The reduction now is about 0.5 mm/year less than the mid 20th century, which means that, relatively speaking, 0.5 mm/year of present sea-level rise can be ascribed to the reduction in recent dam building.
I have been wondering (aloud) about this very thing for years, and a few times here in the comments at this site even. I am glad someone with the proper credentials and required information resources has looked into this.
http://www.kwo.org/Reports%20%26%20Publications/Ogallala_decline_assessment.pdf
In the prairie the ogallala aquifer is large and rapidly falling.
“I also suspect much would evaporate back to the atmosphere and return as rain”
While this is true, it may not fall where it was evaporated. Take for example the Great Basin of the US where huge amounts of water are extracted from deep aquifers for irrigation. Some of this certainly will percolate into the soil and charge shallow aquifers and much will evaporate but the rain doesn’t fall there, it is still a desert.
In fact, I doubt much of what percs will reach an aquifer as once the irrigation is done, the plants will continue to absorb the moisture from the soil and put it into the air through transpiration. Pretty much all of it will go into the air to fall at some distant place as rain.
The Total Idiot says:
September 29, 2010 at 11:28 am
Forgive my saying this, but is it not true that, save for artesian basins closed off from easy water escape, that this water will escape on its own to the sea eventually?
The same thoughts came to my stupid head as soon as I read the title then, while scrolling down to the comment box. You got there beore me.. good one.
We would need to know the total amount of groundwater that don’t get replenished fast enough to comment on any of this. If the amount is small compared to the ocean, well nothing there. However, if the amount is significant, more dangerous than sea level increasing, is the dilution of the ocean. A reduction of salinity could be more disastrous than a little rise.
The opposite is true here. Pump out too much fresh water from a well or borehole & you get brine. The groundwater floats on salt water (halocline) and as you consume it the sea water flows in to equal the different head pressure. So I am doing my bit to prevent global inundation, how about you?
kramer says:
September 29, 2010 at 11:49 am
“[…] http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/wp.html ”
Thanks; i didn’t know about that. Here is a transcript of a speech by Louis Frank with photos of the “atmospheric holes” created by the proposed water comets and diagrams.
http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/preslectures/frank99/index.html
Do I sense something new to tax?
Good grief. First of all, not ALL rainwater falling on land ends up in the ocean. There are many basins that have no outlet to an ocean or sea. Examples abound: The Great Salt Lake in Utah, Salton Sea in California, to name just two.
Adding to my earlier comment on basins without an outlet: This has a good world map showing such basins.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic
Would this cause land to subside also by a small amount?
I think Hansen should figure out a way to protest this & then get arrested.
Maybe he could picket a wellhead at the Ogallala Aquifer? He could wear that cool “Indiana Jones” hat & everything!!
Folks, it’s called the Hydrologic Cycle. Don’t forget, when we burn any hydrocarbon (coal, oil etc), we generate water in addition to carbon dioxide. Here:
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/511natgascombust.html
I have a good friend (chemical engineer) who posits that the combustion of coal, oil etc. since the Industrial Revolution has raised sea level, and I’ve never run the numbers to verify, but I’m certain there is some impact.
That’s 20 a minute, 1,200 an hour, 28,800 a day, 864,000 a month and more than 10 million a year.
That’s about a cubic mile of water per year, assuming each house is 2000 square feet and 10 feet tall. The ocean is 329 million cubic miles, and is about 12,400 feet deep on average. The effect of the small comets would be about 13 microns of sea level rise per year (about a half-thousandth of an inch)
So to put that into perspective, if 0.8mm is being withdrawn from the ground AND finds its way to the ocean, that is 61x the amount described by the 20 houses per minute.
Surely the volcanoes must be injecting a not too insignificant amount of H2O into the atmosphere from deep within the Earth’s crust? For example, it is estimated that Mount Etna releases roughly 200,000 metric tons of water vapor into the atmosphere each day. It’s also interesting to note that in 1991, Mount Pinatubo ejected 491 million tons of water directly into the atmosphere during a single eruption. I’m guessing all that water vapor eventually rains down on Earth and goes somewhere like, you know… the oceans.
Then of course there are the small comets and icy meteorites that are constantly bombarding the Earth. No one has any idea how much water those are contributing to the oceans — but we know it’s happening.
Which Pielke? The first link goes to Pielke Sr.’s site, but perhaps you should have a more visible identification.
😉
“All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full: unto the place from which the rivers come; thither to return again.” Ecclesiastes 1:7
Hey, they figured this one out around 300 BCE. How long does the AGW crowd take to catch on to things?
Are we now simply accepting the sea level rise based on altimetry data from Topex and Jason without any conjecture at all? Surely, there is some doubt about this rate (3.2 mm/yr), given that many, many other, largely, tide-guage based measurements give around half this rise. For example, Church and White, 2006 give 1.7 mm/yr; Holgate, 2007 around 1.7 mm/yr; Domingues et al, 2007 ~ 1.5-1.6 mm/yr; Woppelmann et al, 2009 – 1.58 mm/yr; Leuliette and Miller, 2009 – 1.5 mm/yr.
I always thought that altimetry data were supposed to be corrected with data from properly sited tide guages that allowed for vertical geology movements to be taken into account. How has this almost double measurement by altimetry not come under further question? While tide guages have become less frequently used in modern years, surely there is enough of an overlap period with altimetry to resolve this issue. It is a really big deal.
All the glacier melt from CAGW is providing, at most, a theoretical 0.6mm increase per year in sea levels. Extraction around 0.8 according to this article.
The amount of water contained in the atmosphere- if it all fell at once- is equivalent in a year to 25 mm of increase over the whole surface of the planet, so around 40mm when directed into the ultimate repository-the oceans.
Accepting that some water is always going to be locked up in transit in rivers or impounded in reservoirs, the annual rainfall and its affect on sea levels would seem to be potentially a much more acute problem than sea level rise from melting glaciers.
As the earth gets naturally warmer it holds more moisture (and Co2) For this to have no impact on sea levels (and overall Co2 levels) it must remain in broad equilbrium, that is to say the amount of precipitation equals the rate of evaporation.
However, more warmth tends to lead to cloudier skies and more rain, so therefore leading to a net increase in precipitation and a reduction in evaporation. It wouldn’t take too many years of high rainfall and low evaporation to make a considerable difference to ocean levels and one considerably greater than glacier melt or groundwater extraction.
Can I have some funding to explore this please?
tonyb
I think a lot of people on this blog are losing sight of the significance of this announcement.
If the amount of Eustatic water from borehole depletion is increased from 0.1mm/yr (IPCC AR4) to 0.8 mm/yr (Pielke), there is now a lot less heat that has entered Earths system. Where before the IPCC used (or should have used) the oceans rise as a gage of heat content.
The article above mentions a total rise of 3.2 mm/yr, but the short term present rate is closer to 1.6 mm/yr. Taking all the eustatic inputs into the oceans rise would now indicate that the Steric rise is negative. This would fit with the findings of the Argos bouy system; a cooling ocean.
BBD says:
September 29, 2010 at 11:54 am
“Given the hideously complex task of calculating ‘global average’ sea level rise, I have always wondered how much reliance can be placed on the estimates. The more I learn about satellite altimetry and GIA, the less confident I am in the widely accepted value for SLR.
The error bars alway seem so tiny: 3.2mm +/- 0.4mm/yr.
0.4mm either way… Really?”
The notion that we “know” what MSL is to a millimeter or tenth of a millimeter accuracy is such utter hogwash that I am continually amazed at the number of threads here and elsewhere, even where the vast majority of commenters are self proclaimed skeptics, in which that dubious notion is implicitly accepted as fact in many arguments.
To save time I will reproduce a part of a comment I posted on one of the Trenberth “missing heat” threads a few days ago
“I would recommend once again that people study this document
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/J2_handbook_v1-3_no_rev.pdf
It is the data products handbook for the Jason 2 satellite system, which is the latest and greatest of the number of satellites that have been the source of data used to calculate MSL as the basis of that oft displayed graph of rising sea level, The pertinent section for this discussion is 2.3.1 where they describe how they hope to achieve globally averaged RMS accuracy of 3.4 CENTIMETERS, which would seem to be a fantastically optimistic hope since in the following table they indicate that there ability to measure significant wave height is limited to accuracies of o.4 to o.9 METERS
In other words we have another example of data quoted to phenomenal levels of precision, where the underlying accuracy is numerous orders of magnitude worse. If you lay a +/- 3.4 cm error band on that rising MSL graph it nicely covers the entire difference from the beginning to the end and as I said this is the latest and greatest sat. which is probably several orders of magnitude better than the sats that provided the earliest data”
Personally I think if they are getting +/- 1 meter accuracy for MSL with satellite altimetry it is probably a minor miracle, given the multitude of mostly modeled corrections and the physical limitations of the ranging method itself.
It’s an interesting topic. I find it hard to believe that you can accurately measure this. You are talking about 10’s of thousands of communities with dozens of variables that would change from year to year.
Finally! A Watergate!
Our problem here on the coast is salt water infiltration as a result of groundwater extraction. As noted above, this is where several fields of study come together: geology, oceanography, meteorology, biology, agronomy, soil science. As to the latter, it’s about time we heard more about that essential resource, soil, in these discussions.
Sea level rise is a total fraud.
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/NilsAxelMornerinterview.pdf