Welcome to the Water in the Western United States course. We're glad you're signed up and you're here to join us for a broad exploration of water resources in the United States from a variety of angles: Legal and historic, social and physical with an emphasis on climate but also about controversial issues and the future of the region. Before we talk about how the course is going to work and what you're going to learn, we want to get you excited about the course. So let's go on a quick tour of the West. The West is a land of stark contrasts. It's home to gorgeous but extremely dry deserts, like this one. It's also home to soaring mountain peaks covered in snow much of the year, like the ones you're seeing here. One of those desert basins includes the lowest point in the country well below sea level. Well, we also have the two great mountain chains of the West, the Sierra Nevada's and the Rockies which claim the highest points in the continental US Across the west you find major metropolitan areas, like the Megalopolis of Los Angeles. Yet much of the land is very sparsely populated, including large tracks of land that are owned by the US Federal Government. The area was long inhabited by various Native American groups but settled by European Americans over the last roughly 150 years, many of whom began economies based on mining, logging and agriculture. In recent years, the West has added humanities and recreation based component to its economy and many areas are world famous for their natural attractions and activities, like fishing and skiing. In the arid West, times of drought are all too common, yet rapid snow melt, massive thunderstorms and other extreme events can cause extraordinarily catastrophic flooding in many river basins. In fact the incredible variability in stream flow, is actually a characteristic of western waterways especially prior to human development. So to combat droughts and floods, the West employs an incredible suite of storage and diversion projects and is home to some of the largest civil works efforts ever in the United States. Like the famous Hoover Dam outside of Las Vegas. Above all, the West is a dry land. In general, when we speak about the Western US, we're referring to the land of the continental US, west of the a 100th meridian which runs roughly down the middle of the country. That's where the annual rainfall drops below 20 inches or 50 centimeters per year, which is approximately the lower limit for rain fed agriculture. In that total rainfall amount heights, incredible, seasonal, year-to-year, and decadal variabiltiy and other characteristics of the West. The life-blood of farms, cities and businesses in these areas are the small rivers that carries snow melt from high mountain peaks down into the grasslands and deserts. Compared to the wetter parts of the United States, these rivers are tiny but as we'll see their importance to these lands cannot be overstated. With so little water and so much depending on them, conflicts and unique issues arise, which is the heart of what we're going to cover throughout the course. In this course, we are providing you with the context through which you can understand these issues. So we are aiming to familiarize you with the physical and social geography of the American West. We'll provide a broad background of the major, political, social and legal issues surrounding water management in the American West. We'll discuss how present climate drives the hydrology of the American West and how a warming planet will change the climate and thus the hydrology in the West. Finally, we'll describe major ongoing water-related issues in the West and possible solutions to the challenges their region faces. We know many of you may not actually be from the American West and we particularly welcome you to learn about our region and the importance of water here. We think the interplay of science, geography and policy makes for a fascinating study of how a scarce but necessary resource gets managed in an ever changing context. We know that what has happened with water in the western United States has informed and been informed by other complex water arrangements around the world, like Australia's Murray-Darling Basin. So we hope this course is appealing to you whether you're here to learn more about your own backyard, or whether you know nothing about this region. Regardless of where you live, we want this course to tell you something about water resource management that you can apply in your own home area. So thanks again for joining us. In the rest of this module, we briefly cover the water cycle and the geography of the West, before we formally introduce how the course works. We hope that sounds like a fun and interesting course to you. See you next time.
