UC Santa Barbara
UC Santa Barbara is a university that is part of the pulse of the water sector. Here we bring together everything it publishes on Smart Water Magazine: its news, its blogs and the events it takes part in.
The atmosphere’s growing thirst is making droughts worse, even where it rains
Hot air holds more moisture. That’s why you can blow your hair dry even after a steamy shower. It’s also what dumps rain in the tropics and sucks water from desert soils. A new study, published in Nature, shows that the atmosphere’s growing thirst for water is making droughts more severe, even in places where rainfall […]
Managing meandering waterways in a changing world
Just as water moves through a river, rivers themselves move across the landscape. They carve valleys and canyons, create floodplains and deltas, and transport sediment from the uplands to the ocean. A paper out of UC Santa Barbara presents an account of what drives the migration rates of meandering rivers. The two authors compiled a […]
Small changes can yield big savings in agricultural water use
While Hollywood and Silicon Valley love the limelight, California is an agricultural powerhouse, too. Agricultural products sold in the Golden State totaled $59 billion in 2022. But rising temperatures, declining precipitation and decades of over pumping may require drastic changes to farming. Legislation to address the problem could even see fields taken out of cultivation. […]
Global groundwater depletion is accelerating, but is not inevitable
The most comprehensive analysis of global groundwater levels to date, of nearly 1,700 aquifers demonstrates the prevalence of groundwater depletion, ocurring in 71% of the aquifers. However, there are places where levels have stabilized or recovered: groundwater declines of the 1980s and ’90s reversed in 16% of the aquifer systems. Regardless of whether it comes from supply or demand, aquifer recovery seemed to require intervention, the study revealed.
How a drought affects trees depends on what’s been holding them back
Droughts can be good for trees. Certain trees, that is. Contrary to expectation, sometimes a record-breaking drought can increase tree growth. Why and where this happens is the subject of a new paper in Global Change Biology. A team of scientists led by Joan Dudney at UC Santa Barbara examined the drought response of endangered whitebark pine over […]
Pumping draws young groundwater to new depths, potentially with contaminants in tow
How old is your water? It may seem like a peculiar question at first, but there are real implications to how long a drop of water has spent underground. Research suggests that the water cycle is speeding up in some places as a result of human enterprise. Scientists at UC Santa Barbara discovered that relatively […]
Where rivers jump course: First global compilation of river avulsions
Humans have always had a complex relationship with rivers, which both fostered and threatened civilizations throughout history. Just recall Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of death and rebirth, who was inextricably linked with the annual flooding of the Nile. Large floods will sometimes force a river to jump course and forge a new path across […]
Headwater refuges: Combined effect of drought and fire on stream communities
Researchers investigate the combined effect of drought and fire on stream communities, highlighting the importance of headwaters.
The impacts of human wastewater in coastal ecosystems
The tendency for most of us when it comes to human wastewater is out of sight, out of mind. Rarely do we consider what happens after we flush that toilet or turn off that tap. However, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have turned their attention and considerable computational power to the subject and its impacts […]