Comparison of potential drinking water source contamination across one hundred U.S. cities

Sean W.D. Turner, Jennie S. Rice, Kristian D. Nelson, Chris R. Vernon, Ryan McManamay, Kerim Dickson, Landon Marston

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

51 Scopus citations

Abstract

Drinking water supplies of cities are exposed to potential contamination arising from land use and other anthropogenic activities in local and distal source watersheds. Because water quality sampling surveys are often piecemeal, regionally inconsistent, and incomplete with respect to unregulated contaminants, the United States lacks a detailed comparison of potential source water contamination across all of its large cities. Here we combine national-scale geospatial datasets with hydrologic simulations to compute two metrics representing potential contamination of water supplies from point and nonpoint sources for over a hundred U.S. cities. We reveal enormous diversity in anthropogenic activities across watersheds with corresponding disparities in the potential contamination of drinking water supplies to cities. Approximately 5% of large cities rely on water that is composed primarily of runoff from non-pristine lands (e.g., agriculture, residential, industrial), while four-fifths of all large cities that withdraw surface water are exposed to treated wastewater in their supplies.

Original languageEnglish
Article number7254
JournalNature Communications
Volume12
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2021
Externally publishedYes

Funding

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, as part of research in MultiSector Dynamics, Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program (Grant No. 59534, supporting S.T., J.R., C.V., K.N., and R.M.). L.M. acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation Grant ACI-1639529 (“INFEWS/T1: Mesoscale Data Fusion to Map and Model the U.S. Food, Energy, and Water (FEW) System”), as well as U.S. Geological Survey Grant/Cooperative Agreement No. G20AP00002 (“Mapping and modeling of interbasin water transfers within the United States”) and the U.S. Geological Survey John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis supported working group project (“Reanalyzing and Predicting U.S. Water Use using Economic History and Forecast Data: an experiment in short-range national hydro-economic data synthesis”). We thank Beth Mundy, James Stegen, Cecilia Torta-jada (reviewer), and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions for improvement. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organizations named above.

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