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KERN COUNTY, Calif. -- Bumping along a wide, gravel road, Jon Parker deftly maneuvers his pickup truck while simultaneously pulling out a collection of laminated maps from his center console. Dotted with brightly colored squares, the maps show the extent of the 32-square-mile Kern Water Bank. Thin lines cut through the patchwork illustrating who puts in water when it's wet, and therefore who can take it out when it's dry. The water bank is basically an ATM for water, and in drought-stricken California, water is currency in itself. While floodwaters might cost a farmer $2 to $3 an acre-foot, buying water on the market four years into the current drought might fetch something closer to $1,200 per acre-foot. This year, the state is banking on something else: El Niño. The powerful weather system has already dumped both water and snow on the state. As of Tuesday, snow survey data from the California Department of Water Resources showed snow levels at 56 percent of the historical average for Dec. 1, up from 24 percent a year ago. Still, experts say the state has a long way to go before it's out of the drought, a drought that could have been slightly less painful if the state's groundwater resources had been replenished to their full capacity, ready for use when the water got scarce. Located off Interstate 5 in California's agriculture-rich Central Valley, the water bank at capacity can store about 1.5 million acre-feet of water. If water is plentiful, the bank can put about 500,000 acre-feet in the ground and bring back up about half of that for use in a year. To place that in perspective, 1 acre-foot of water is enough to meet the needs of two families of four for a year. As the truck zooms by a canal full of crystal-clear blue water, about 30 feet wide and equally as deep, Parker gestures to a vast extent of dry, brown land, dotted with hearty-looking shrubs and dried-up cattails. In wet years, that landscape would be awash in cerulean blue. The recharge ponds can filter water into the underground aquifer at a rate of 0.2 to 0.4 feet per day. In addition to the bank's participants choosing to place their water allocations from the State Water Project into the water bank, during wet years, the bank can take excess water from the Kern or Friant rivers. It is operated by the Kern Water Bank Authority, which is a public agency operating as a joint powers authority. It includes six member entities, including several water districts, a water agency and a water company. "We haven't had water in the ponds since January of 2012," Parker explains. In a wet year, there would be about 2 to 3 feet in the fields, or recharge ponds as they're known at the water bank. "We still have water in the ground, so next year we'll continue to pump." These days, in Kern County, he says everyone is into water banking. "If you didn't have the water bank, what would happen is in those wet years when the State Water Project has surplus water, that water would just flow out into the ocean or in Kern County here, the water would flood farmland or it would go into the aqueduct and go south if they had capacity," says Parker, who is general manger of the Kern Water Bank, the largest groundwater banking operation in California and quite possibly the world. "It wouldn't be put to beneficial use. So what we're doing here is we're putting the water to beneficial use by capturing that surplus water, storing it up and having it available for when it's dry." And dry is a huge concern for a state that produces nearly half of United States-grown nuts, fruits and vegetables. In 2013, California's agriculture sector exported more than $21 billion in products. Even more than that, groundwater banking offers a flexible alternative for a state whose water storage system is predicated by surface reservoirs that rely on a melting snowpack. As the climate changes, most experts agree California is going to warm and lose its snowpack but gain more precipitation. Droughts are also expected to become more common. "So what are you going to do if you lose a big chunk of your annual storage?" asked Ellen Hanak, director of the Public Policy Institute of California's Water Policy Center. "It's a way both to store water for local users -- but also because of the innovation that some of the folks down in Kern have introduced -- it's a way for storing water for those who are not local users of that basin. I think it's a really important tool for California." The state Legislature agrees. In response to California's prolonged drought, in September 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). The legislation tasks local agencies with creating a sustainable groundwater management plan, with the first step for most water districts to measure and quantify just how much water they have underground. In some parts of the Central Valley, the rate in which groundwater is being pulled out exceeds the rate in which it can be replaced. The result, after years of overdraft, is the groundwater table has plummeted and, in some places, the land itself is sinking. Rates of subsidence are at nearly 2 inches a month, according to a recent report released by NASA and the California Department of Water Resources. The legislation gives the most-stressed basins until 2020 to adopt groundwater plans and until 2040 to achieve sustainability, and other basins have slightly longer to comply. The state will step in if agencies fail to act. Then there's Proposition 1. Passed in 2014 by California voters, Proposition 1 sets aside $2.7 billion for storage projects. The bond legislation specifies that the state will pay for no more than half of a project, which means buy-in has to be significant. "The incentives for doing it will be improved over time with the existence of SGMA," Hanak said. "If you look at the experience of this drought, one of the things that's really clear is that groundwater is our biggest drought reserve, and so managing it in such a way so that we have it for future droughts is incredibly important."
