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A new Nature Climate Change piece, "The global groundwater crisis," by James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, warns that "most of the major aquifers in the world's arid and semi-arid zones, that is, in the dry parts of the world that rely most heavily on groundwater, are experiencing rapid rates of groundwater depletion."
The groundwater at some of the world's largest aquifers - in the U.S. High Plains, California's Central Valley, China, India, and elsewhere - is being pumped out "at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished."
The most worrisome fact: "nearly all of these underlie the word's great agricultural regions and are primarily responsible for their high productivity."
The apps put more boots on the ground to spot waste and leaks that might go unnoticed, officials say. They say the high-tech citizen reporting programs are intended to encourage water conservation, and not to be used as evidence to fine offenders.Here are a few examples:
But at least one private company is taking things a step further. Creators of Vizsafe, a neighborhood watch app, have added a feature allowing users to map photos of water wasters - a practice dubbed "drought shaming" on Twitter and Instagram.
Comment: Weather bands are moving towards the poles in both hemispheres. The cycle of extreme droughts and heavy deluges is part and parcel to the precursor of mini ice ages. Solar minimums and moving Hadley Cell patterns shift the tropical precipitation to distant latitudes, leaving drought conditions in their wake and forcing moisture into the upper atmosphere where it freezes and rebounds as extreme snowfall. Droughts of this nature are cyclical. For more info on this topic: SOTT Exclusive: A 'Blue Hole,' a cosmic connection and the demise of the Maya