Accurately measuring water use by the economy is essential for developing reliable models of water resource availability. Indeed, these models rely on retrospective analyses that provide insights into shifting human population demands and adaptions to water shortages. However, accurate, methodologically consistent, empirically authentic, and spatiotemporally comprehensive historical datasets for water withdrawals are scarce. Herein, we present a reanalysis of annual resolution (1950–2016) historical data set on irrigation, electric power, and public supply water withdrawal within the conterminous United States (US) at the county‐level, and, for power plants, at the site‐level. To estimate electric power water use, we synthesized a historically comprehensive list of generators and historic patterns in generation across fuels, prime movers, and cooling technologies. Irrigation water use estimation required building a crop‐demand model that utilized historical information on irrigated acreage for crops and golf courses, stage‐specific crop water demand, and climate information. To estimate public water supply use, we developed a random forest model constructed from information on population, infrastructure, climate, and land cover. These estimates generally agree with total county and state water use information provided by the US Geological Survey (USGS) water use circular and estimates generated from independent studies for specific years. However, we also observed discrepancies between our estimates and USGS data that appear to be caused by inconsistencies in the methods used by the USGS's primary data sources at the state level over decades of data collection, highlighting the importance of reanalysis to yield spatiotemporally consistent and intercomparable estimates of water use.

中文翻译：

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1950-2016年间美国灌溉，电力和公共供应部门的取水量再分析

经济对水的使用情况进行准确测量对于建立可靠的水资源可用性模型至关重要。的确，这些模型依赖于回顾性分析，这些分析提供了有关改变人口需求和适应水资源短缺的见解。然而，关于取水的准确，方法学上一致，经验可靠，时空全面的历史数据集却很少。在此，我们对郡县级以及美国电厂（位于美国本土）的灌溉，电力和公共供水取水的年度分辨率（1950–2016）历史数据进行了重新分析。站点级别。为了估算电力用水量，我们综合了历史悠久的发电机清单，以及燃料，原动机，和冷却技术。灌溉用水估算需要建立一个作物需求模型，该模型利用有关作物和高尔夫球场的灌溉面积的历史信息，特定阶段的作物需水量以及气候信息。为了估算公共供水的使用量，我们开发了一个随机森林模型，该模型是根据人口，基础设施，气候和土地覆盖的信息构建的。这些估算通常与美国地质调查局（USGS）用水通知提供的县和州的用水总量信息以及特定年份的独立研究得出的估算相符。但是，我们还观察到我们的估算值和USGS数据之间的差异，这似乎是由于USGS的主要数据源在州一级数十年来收集数据时所使用的方法不一致，