Green and brown map of the United States from RiverRun

Water: Amazing New Map Shows the Path of Every Raindrop that Hits the United States

Jun 8, 2021 at 1:05pm

Paul Rogers

Water is like electricity. Most people don’t think about it much until it’s gone.  Now, as California and other Western states find themselves heading into a severe and worsening drought, a new interactive map is providing a breathtaking journey that shows where America’s water comes from and ends up.  The project is called River Runner. It allows anyone to click on any place where a raindrop would fall in the United States, and then track its path through watersheds, into creeks, rivers, lakes and ultimately the ocean.  “It has implications for where our pollution goes, and how everyone lives downstream of somewhere else,” said Sam Learner, a 27-year-old web developer who built the map in nine days using massive databases from the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Explore the RiverRun Webtool from Sam Learner

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