Comparison of potential drinking water source contamination across one hundred US cities

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dc.contributor.authorTurner, Sean W. D.en
dc.contributor.authorRice, Jennie S.en
dc.contributor.authorNelson, Kristian D.en
dc.contributor.authorVernon, Chris R.en
dc.contributor.authorMcManamay, Ryanen
dc.contributor.authorDickson, Kerimen
dc.contributor.authorMarston, Landon T.en
dc.coverage.countryUnited Statesen
dc.date.accessioned2022-09-02T19:36:39Zen
dc.date.available2022-09-02T19:36:39Zen
dc.date.issued2021-12-13en
dc.description.abstractIn the U.S. today nearly no surface waters are drinkable without treatment. Here, the authors demonstrate that four-fifths of cities that withdraw surface water are supplying water that includes a portion of treated wastewater, concentrated in the Midwest, the South, and Texas. 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.en
dc.description.notesThis 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 Tortajada (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.en
dc.description.sponsorshipU.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science [59534]; National Science Foundation [ACI-1639529]; U.S. Geological Survey Grant/Cooperative Agreement [G20AP00002]; U.S. Geological Survey John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesisen
dc.description.versionPublished versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27509-9en
dc.identifier.eissn2041-1723en
dc.identifier.issue1en
dc.identifier.other7254en
dc.identifier.pmid34903744en
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10919/111701en
dc.identifier.volume12en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherNature Portfolioen
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 Internationalen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/en
dc.subjectwaste-wateren
dc.subjecttrendsen
dc.subjectqualityen
dc.subjectreuseen
dc.titleComparison of potential drinking water source contamination across one hundred US citiesen
dc.title.serialNature Communicationsen
dc.typeArticle - Refereeden
dc.type.dcmitypeTexten

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Scholarly Works, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Destination Area: Global Systems Science (GSS)