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14 <br /> Aa The Economic Importance of Water in Kansas <br /> METHOD AND DATA SOURCES <br /> Water availability is a critical input in the production and consumption activities of any economy. <br /> Data Inputs <br /> Water data for the current study has been supplied by GMD3, who have divided the State of Kansas into <br /> distinct areas,which: <br /> • Are consistent with county boundaries to allow for the use of county level data; and <br /> • Enable use of previous groundwater modeling for supply decline data. <br /> Focusing on both the current and projected available supply of water, and using 2012 water availability <br /> as the base year, GMD3 has identified seven areas within the State that could potentially experience a <br /> water deficit by 2112. These seven areas represent 63 counties, as illustrated in Figure 1. Each deficit <br /> projection is primarily based on the depletion of groundwater supplies and silting of reservoir storage <br /> space. No assumptions are made about climatic conditions such as droughts within the analysis, aside <br /> from the fact that the base year(2012)for the economic modeling is itself a drought year. <br /> Table 1 illustrates the base data supplied by GMD3 for each of the seven areas in 2012, along with the <br /> estimated water availability in CY2062. <br /> Three types of water availability have been supplied by GMD3. Agricultural use refers to the water needed <br /> to meet the irrigation requirements of crops, maintain feedlots and dairies. Municipal use is the water <br /> required to meet urban and rural residential and commercial needs. Industrial water use includes such <br /> purposes as fabricating, processing, washing, diluting, cooling, or transporting a product; incorporating <br /> water into a product; and sanitation needs within manufacturing facilities. To quantify the economic <br /> importance of water in these seven areas in CY2062,Apparet Analytics combines municipal and industrial <br /> water into a single category prior to conducting the analysis. <br /> Table 1 shows that the water deficit for two of the GMD3-defined study areas is not projected to occur <br /> within the 50-year time horizon of the current study. However, the water supply models and other data <br /> sources accessed by GMD3 to provide county level data estimate that the availability of water will decline <br /> in the other five areas featured in this study by CY2062. <br /> In summary,total water availability in the seven study areas identified by GMD3 is estimated to fall 27.7% <br /> by CY2062. <br /> 2 <br /> Apparet Analytics LLC 2015 <br />