California plans to bury El Niño’s downpour

As El Niño’s torrential rain comes closer and closer to bearing down on California, officials have a plan to make the most of the rain: store it underground for later. For years, California has been utilizing an unsustainable amount of water from underground aquifers, in some cases “causing the land to sink by nearly 30 feet,” Matt Simon writes for Grist. But, California’s parched aquifers means there’s plenty of room for storage: if the state plays its cards right, it could store a billion acre-feet of El Niño’s water underground. 

One strategy for drawing water into underground aquifers is to divert “excess rainfall into big dirt bowls on the landscape. This slows it down, allowing it to seep into the underlying aquifer,” Grist reports. Once underground, the water can’t be lost to evaporation, and water managers and farmers can extract it during droughts.

“As a bonus, managed aquifer recharge can boost biodiversity. California has lost 95 percent of its wetlands, which used to mitigate flooding and provide critical habitat, especially for migrating birds. To help restore them, a Nature Conservancy project called BirdReturns incentivizes farmers in the Central Valley to flood their acreage, replicating the erstwhile ecosystems,” Simon reports.