So these satellites are are whizzing by ~500 km above earth and they can tell a 10 micron difference in altitude? That is astounding technology - hard for the mind to perceive.

It looks like Nuclear Powered Desalination Plants should be on someone's drawing board soon.

surely a desalination process can be used to provide irrigation water from sea water and pump it inland? Or pump it down from Canada!

Watching the video though, it's clear that the water drought has only been severe in the last 2 years. This is just a common trend in the worlds natural balance. In the first 45 seconds of the video there is a mass amount of blue that circulates around the US, and it's percentage seems to out do the red until the end. I do not think that this should be to much of a concern. Here in 5 years we'll be complaining about all the floods, we cannot control the whether, but just learn to live with it. And if the water isn't in the ground, then it's somewhere, it doesn't just disappear, it just circulates. It also appears that in the last 3 years the drought focuses around major cities. this may be caused because roads and pavement create a rise in temperatures, and keep the rain water from sinking into the soil. All the runoff goes down drainage systems and gets dumped into the nearest river or lake (flowing away from the city). I believe if we continue to monitor the water levels, we'll see a balance soon enough.

And yet at the same time elsewhere we have problems with an overabundance of freshwater. So if we suck excess water from where we have flooding and inject it into the aquifers after treatment we solve 2 problems.

One better than a previous post. Build desalination plants around the country and pump that water into the aquifers. Bringing the aquifers back to aspirate levels and distributing fresh water to farms and wells around the country cheaply and efficiently by using what nature had already made.

Using solar energy that is free to desalinate the water, around the country where it is dry and use this same free energy to power pumps and get the water around the country

Fracking destroys aquifers, doesn't it? All of the water used - pulled from below ground - is not recycled. It becomes pollution.

Some water users need to get real. Building cities in the desert then sucking up water resources from rivers and groundwater to make them "viable" is plain and simple madness and cannot continue. Most of Aridzona should not be populated, same for Nevada.

What kind of statement is “Fresh water is clearly another nonrenewable resource.” Isn’t it called a “Water Cycle” for a reason; just because we are outpacing the cycle with the increased demand for water does not make it “nonrenewable!” If I remember my Science classes from childhood; water does not disappear, it changes stages between solid; liquid and gas. It has 3 different cycles accruing at the same time; the largest cycle is ice to water to steam to rain back to ice. The intermediate cycle uses the earth’s crust as a filter and deposits fresh water into the aquifers where it’s then pumped to the surface used and then filtered back down into the aquifer. The shortest cycle is rainfall, evaporation, rainfall. Warm weather can speed up evaporation or melt ice faster but it does not help the filtering of clean water; the aquifer cannot be replenished itself any faster than it is doing so naturally. If we have the technology to build cities in the deserts; we should be able to find a safe man-made way to help the aquifer keep up with our water demands. Understanding just how long it takes for fresh water to recycle itself naturally should be the first step in producing any kind of solution to aid our water shortage issues.