Blog: Explaining water units to real people (who like basketball)
It’s March madness once again as we try to explain water conditions in California to real people in the midst of additional basketball madness. We all enjoy and suffer with basketball. This commonality can make it a useful unit of volume among the many units of volume used for water. A basketball has the volume of about 1/4 cubic feet (4 basketballs per cubic foot). So a flow of 1,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) has a volume equivalent of having 4,000 basketballs coming at you every second. An acre-foot (af) is a volume one foot deep over an acre of area. It has a volume of 43,560 cubic feet or 325,850 gallons, or 174,240 basketballs. One cfs flowing for one day (24 hours) discharges almost 2 acre-feet (1.98) of volume (348,480 basketballs/day). A million gallons per day (mgd) has the same volume as 1.87 million basketballs per day. (There are 7.48 gallons per cubic foot)