
California drought, visualized with open data - almost_usual
http://cida.usgs.gov/ca_drought/
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jason_allen
This presentation format was terrible, which is a shame with so much
interesting data to present. Kudos to the data research, but please consider
re-publishing in a sane format.

~~~
hnriot
I agree totally, I switched to FF to see if that would help but sadly it
doesn't. The data is awesome, but presentation really makes it impossible to
see.

I wish the data were near real time, I knew this was a bad drought, but what I
was hoping to see was what impact the last few rains have made on the supply.

~~~
wayanon
Agree too - so the reservoir data goes up and down but I don't know what
that's supposed to be illustrating, same with the other stuff like snow packs.

I hoped to see something that would make me think 'wow that's serious' but it
doesn't seem clear to me.

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bmease
Interesting that irrigation is the largest use of water at ~60%, but livestock
and industrial are only 0.5% and 1.5% respectively. I would have thought
livestock and industrial use would be larger. Is this distribution of water
common in other states?

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dubfan
Probably not. Agriculture in the western US relies on irrigation due to water
scarcity, but places like Iowa have the opposite problem. They actually shunt
water off of their fields. Also, losses of agricultural water due to
evapotranspiration are higher in CA than in a state like WA due to the hotter,
drier climate in CA.

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BlakePetersen
Bummer, data ends right before last major storms rolled in. I would like to
see how this data has changed over the course of the last week.

~~~
BuffaloBagel
USGS Water Year runs from October 1 to September 30 (of the next year.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_year](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_year)

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ikawe
You can find realtime data from LA Aqueduct sensors over at
[http://api.thirsty.la](http://api.thirsty.la)

I always like to plug my own scrappy scraper here when water issues come up in
hopes that someone else might do something more exciting with the data.

Note that the samples are a couple days old - their sensor network sometimes
goes down, and I get the opportunity to correspond with the kindly LADWP IT
staff every so often.

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briantakita
Permaculture & other forms of sustainable agriculture really needs to be a
part of this discussion. Natural ecosystems retain water on the land and
increase rainfall.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBLZmwlPa8A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBLZmwlPa8A)

The east coast has lots of people & lots of trees. California has lots of
people and not many trees.

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nodata
Why does scrolling the page change the timeline? _confused_

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wayanon
'Firefox is recommended for the best viewing experience' weird

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therobot24
This does not work well on mobile

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cmelbye
It didn't work well on desktop either. I can't wait until the "navigate to
different things as the user scrolls" trend dies—this would have been SO much
more effective without that.

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coherentpony
Argh, this page is _terrible_. I do _not_ give you permission to hijack my
scrolling mechanism. Stop it. Stop it now.

