Turning Data into Action

How the "Al Gore of Water" is Turning Data into Action

For the last few years, Jay Famiglietti—hydrologist, UC-Irvine professor, and senior water scientist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Labratory (JPL)—has written an annual op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, sounding an alarm about California's epic drought that, for the most part, seemed to fall on deaf ears.

In an interview just days before his 2015 op-ed was to be published, Famiglietti said, "I don't think people really understand the severity of the situation. The picture that comes out of our data is very very scary, and a little bit overwhelming. I don't know if California's water agencies consider our work to be informative, or just a major pain in the ass, but it seems like for some of them, it's the latter."

So it was a bit of a surprise whenthis year'sop-ed (original headline: "California Has About One Year of Water Left. Will You Ration Now?") took off the way it did. Though it would be folly to directly link the recent wild uptick indrought media coverageto his statements, Famiglietti followed publication with a dizzying run of print interviews andtalk show appearances, including a memorable spot on Real Time with Bill Maher, during which the host referred to him as the "Al Gore of Water." Within two weeks, California governor Jerry Brown had issued a precedent-shatteringexecutive orderimposing the state's first-ever mandatory water restrictions.

Famiglietti says he can't be sure why any particular op-ed or data set takes hold of the public imagination. Perhaps it was the frankness of this one's headline that attracted attention. (On hiswebsite, Famiglietti calls the piece "Up a Dry Creek.") Followingrumblingsthat the story made the situation seem worse than it is, the Los Angeles Times changed the phrase"One Year of Water Left" to "One Year of Water Stored." Still, Famiglietti believes in clearly and simply communicating his findings to officials and the general public whenever he has the opportunity, as well as being forceful when the data indicate that circumstances are dire.

"I wouldn't call writing a scientific paper easy, but it's easier than communicating with the public," he says. "Scientist-to-scientist communication is about nerds talking to other nerds in our own nerd language, and we understand each other well. But the average person on the street doesn't comprehend our jargon… You may think you're sounding really smart by using big words, but if they miss 50 percent of what you say, they're not coming back. And that's been an important lesson."

Ever conscious of losing the layperson's attention, Famiglietti inspired NASA to create a short, accessible cartoon detailing just how GRACE manages to track water levels so well. "The system is really quite accurate," he says, clearly delighted. "It's incredible."

The amount of data continuously generated by GRACE is staggering. It takes about a month for the satellites to map the entire globe's gravity field—then Famiglietti's research team needs three or four months to pore over that month's worth of findings. The process is, as he describes it, "extremely lengthy, complicated, and man-power intensive."

This summer, Famiglietti hopes to release data from March 2015, which he expects will be significant. The March before, GRACE recorded California's biggest water deficit ever: The state's reservoirs had fallen short by 11 trillion gallons. March tends to be the most statistically significant month for the California drought, as it's traditionally when the snowpack in the Sierras is at its peak—averaging about66.5 inchesdeep before it melts and refills the state's water supply.

But for the first time in 74 years, there wasno snowleft on the ground in the Sierras by the time March 2015 was over. Not a single inch.

The kind of research done by Famiglietti is incredibly complex, the product of a technological marvel he callsGRACE(short for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment). GRACE is comprised of a pair of twin satellites that function a bit like a "scale in the sky," says Famiglietti, "chasing each other in orbit 400 kilometers above the Earth." Each satellite is about the size of a "mini-van," he says, and "when there's more water mass on the ground—say, after a big snowstorm in the Sierras—gravity pulls them down a fraction of a millimeter."

Source: Good

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