One minute we’re suffering from a summer drought; the next minute an intense storm rolls in and a month’s worth of rain falls in a day. As our world becomes warmer the chances of climate extremes, such as droughts and floods, become greater.
We can’t control the weather, but we can manage the water. A technique known as managed aquifer recharge, where flood water is captured and injected into aquifers, is already helping the US state of Texas ride out the worst of its weather extremes.
Gentle drizzle is good at recharging aquifers, but heavy rain tends to run across the surface and ultimately ends up back in the sea. Managed aquifer storage diverts and captures some of that flood water, by storing it temporarily at the surface and then injecting it gradually into depleted underlying aquifers.
More than 1,000 such schemes already exist worldwide and now a study in Texas (which has three managed aquifer storage schemes) has demonstrated the potential of this technique.
Weather and river data from the past 50 years suggest that if flood-capture systems were installed on the 10 major rivers discharging into the Gulf of Mexico, Texas could replenish much of its depleted groundwater in just a few years.
