Acre-foot


The acre-foot is a non-SI unit of volume commonly used in the United States in reference to large-scale water resources, such as reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, sewer flow capacity, irrigation water, and river flows.
An acre-foot equals approximately an 8 lane swimming pool, 25 meters long, 16 m wide and 3 m deep.
Government policy in the United States, as stated by law, is to phase out imperial and US customary unit and replace them with metric equivalents. As of 2018, the metric system is mandatory to use in trade and commerce in all countries except the United States, Myanmar and Liberia.

Definitions

As the name suggests, an acre-foot is defined as the volume of one acre of surface area to a depth of one foot.
Since an acre is defined as a chain by a furlong, an acre-foot is.
There are two definitions of an acre-foot, depending on whether the "foot" used is an "international foot" or a "U.S. survey foot".

Application

As a rule of thumb in US water management, one acre-foot is taken to be the planned water usage of a suburban family household, annually. In some areas of the desert Southwest, where water conservation is followed and often enforced, a typical family uses only about 0.25 acre-foot of water per year. One acre-foot/year is approximately 893 gallons per day.
The acre-foot has been used historically in the US in many water-management agreements, for example the Colorado River Compact, which divides 15 million acre-feet per year among seven western US states.
Water reservoir capacities in the US are commonly given in thousands of acre-feet, abbreviated TAF.
In most other countries except the US, the metric system is in common use and water volumes are normally expressed in litre, cubic metre or cubic kilometre. One acre-foot is approximately equivalent to 1.233 megalitres. Large bodies of water may be measured in cubic kilometres, with 1 million acre-feet approximately equalling 1.233 km. As of 2018, the metric system is mandatory to use in trade and commerce in all countries except US, Myanmar and Liberia.