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

Autor: Turner SWD; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA. sean.turner@pnnl.gov., Rice JS; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA., Nelson KD; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA., Vernon CR; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA., McManamay R; Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA., Dickson K; Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA., Marston L; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Nature communications [Nat Commun] 2021 Dec 13; Vol. 12 (1), pp. 7254. Date of Electronic Publication: 2021 Dec 13.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27509-9
Abstrakt: 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.
(© 2021. Battelle Memorial Institute.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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