DROUGHT/
CLIMATE CHANGE
Vanishing Act: NASA scientist
Jay Famiglietti on Our Challenging
Water Future

NASA. The word evokes space exploration, rockets and missions to faraway planets. But one of the agency’s most intriguing ventures is what it learns by turning its view back at Earth. H2O Radio's Frani Halperin met Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to talk about the agency's latest endeavors. Satellites with names like "GRACE" are "amazing"—not just for their bird's-eye view of our home planet but for what that perspective is telling us about our challenging water future.

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WATER RIGHTS
Little Ditch. Big Deal. A Couple Living Off the Grid Challenged Colorado Water Law—and Won.

Living off the grid in Colorado's vast San Luis Valley, Chuck and Barbara Tidd needed to find a source of energy to supplement their solar panels. Their solution, to use a creek on their property to generate power, led to a legal battle that went all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court—where they won. That decision worries some who say their new right could upend water law that goes back 150 years.

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EMERGING CONTAMINANTS
Forgotten: Did the State of Colorado Leave Residents with Bad Water?

Gas drilling came to the Raton Basin of southern Colorado in the late 1990s and along with it heavy traffic, noise—and what many locals believe—contaminated water. Numerous residents had discovered they had a chemical in their water, "tert-Butyl alcohol" or "TBA." The COGCC, the state agency that regulates oil and gas activities, investigated and published a report suggesting TBA was naturally occurring, among other explanations. Now the case is closed and the report, not only leaves more questions than it answers—it resigns residents to live with water they feel they dare not drink.

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