What do you know about Idaho's water and land?
Here are some arcane facts from the Idaho Department of Water Resources. Perhaps you can use them some time to impress your students!
| State water surface area | 880 square miles |
| Number of lakes | More than 2,000 |
| Largest lake - Pend Oreille | 180 square miles |
| Miles of streams and rivers | 93,000 miles |
| Longest river - Snake River | 779 miles |
| Average annual precipitation | Varies from 10 to over 50 inches |
| Annual stream inflow to state | About 37 million acre-feet |
| Annual stream outflow from state | About 75 million acre-feet |
| Irrigated area of state | 4 million acres |
| Active reservoir storage capacity | 12,384,000 acre-feet |
| Largest active storage reservoir - Dworshak | 2,016,000 acre-feet |
| Snake Plain aquifer storage (top 100 feet of aquifer | About 100 million acre-feet |
| Total land area | 83,557 square miles |
| Federal land ownership | 63.8 percent |
| State/county/city land ownership | 5.2 percent |
| Private land ownership | 31.0 percent |
Now here is some information to make sense of acre-feet and related information.
"Water Conversion Factors"
| 1 acre-foot | Enough water to cover 1 acre of land 1 foot deep | |
| 1 acre-foot | 43,560 cubic feet | |
| 1 acre-foot | 325,850 gallons | |
| 1 million gallons | 3.0689 acre-feet | |
| 10 cents per 1,000 gallons | $32.59 per acre-foot | |
| 1 cubic foot (cf) | 7.4805 gallons | 62.37 pounds |
| 1 cubic foot/second | 448.83 gallons/minute | 26,930 gallons/hour |
| 1 cubic foot/second | 646,315 gallons/day | 1.9835 acre-feet/day |
| 1 miner's inch | 9 gallons per minute | 0.02 cubic feel per second |
More information is
available at the
Idaho Department of Water Resources at (208) 327-7900
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Katherine A. Young and Virgil M. Young
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in cooperation with Boise State University