Aaron Million, the man talking about piping water from the borderlands around Flaming Gorge in Utah, or alternatively the Brown's Hole area of Colorado, to the Front Range cities like Ft. Collins, Denver and Pueblo, says the pipeline will move between 165,000 and 250,000 acre-feet of water. How much is that exactly?
An acre foot is one acre covered by one foot of water. An acre is 660 feet by 66 feet or 43,560 square feet. A football field is 300 feet by 160 feet, not including the end zones, or 48,000 square feet so it can give a good visual approximation.
This isn't nearly as spectacular as the stuff on Visual Complexity, but it does give a simple visualization of how much water Million is talking about. The Colorado River Compact divides 15 million acre feet of water per year to various western states. The graphic was prepared by Passy Cassini & Associates.
