New ways are being sought to use surface-water resources such as rain water harvesting or irrigating with seasonal runoff from adjacent highlands.
Though little rain falls in deserts, deserts receive runoff from ephemeral, or short-lived, streams fed by rain and snow from adjacent highlands.
It is therefore but spottily productive of game or timber or anything else, and often causes high runoff and erosion in critical watersheds.
Economics and technology dictate that reservoir capacities devoted to the storage of flood water, for example, be considerably smaller than the maximum runoff conceivably possible.
Land runoff in general furnishes a large amount of pollution of all classes, and in all parts of the upper Basin except the least-used forest sections.
Acceleration of work to improve the hydrologic characteristics of these lands, with the purpose of decreasing damage from rapid runoff and increasing the flow of clean natural water in the streams during critical low-flow periods.
Around a city the size of the Washington metropolis, this runoff would constitute a worrisome pollution problem even if the matter of sanitary wastes were thoroughly in control.
Surface runoff from both cities and rural areas, as we have seen, causes much pollution.
Pollutive runoff from urban areas merges with the whole question of urban sewer systems, for most of it gets to the river through storm sewers.
In field areas where a toxic agent has been sprayed or disseminated over a land area, the best time to collect water samples is just after the start of a rainstorm when runoff is beginning.
General Water supplies in areas with NBC contamination and in surface water supplied by runoff from such areas will most likely be contaminated.
It now seems to him that he could be happy and contented with his parched mouth, and his throbbing brain, and his rapid pulse, if only he could know that there were no swelling under the left arm; but dares he try?
Phil,' Charlie says, 'the ditch that carries the runoffup at the spring needs widening.
Dan and I moved away and sat under a shed along the runoff of the spring and had no choice about listening to a conversation not intended for our ears.
After rains, runoff gathers in large potholes in the White Rim Sandstone in some places and affords emergency drinking water.
All Basin runoff heads for this chute, and when it storms in the heights, the dry waterfall turns into a torrent, with boulders bouncing along like so many corks.
Many of the same water insects inhabit yet another type of waterhole, the tinaja, a natural pothole that traps rain or runoff in solid rock.
The only grass you see grows in a buff-colored strip on either side of the road, whererunoff from infrequent rains creates a habitat moist enough for grasses to germinate and reach maturity.
