Lakes, reprise

In view of my constant fascination with lakes, I have a new and more idiotic question than ever before. This is not an article or an essay, just a meandering exploration of things I found interesting. It's not as well-written or as ground-breaking as my previous flights of fancy, and that's alright. I'm not writing these for you; this writing is just a reason for me to research, a way to spend my time well, and a documentation of my findings.
If you find it interesting, helpful, or enlightening, God bless you. And so we begin.

What percentage of the United States is surface water? And of course, this comes with a flood of other inane questions that are easily answered by a single Google search. Come with me on an adventure of pure, untethered silliness as I dissolve into increasingly difficult-to-answer questions, aided only by the greatest collection of knowledge the world has ever produced and my own feeble research abilities. One by one, we shall knock down the doors to the temples of knowledge and ask the confused monks whether the state with the largest percentage of water is likely to be a very small state due to its overall small area of land, or if it's just Michigan because it's probably Michigan, isn't it? Take my hand, and we shall see realms undreamed of. And incidentally, the United States is 3.96% surface water (not counting ocean).

Considering that the United States is the fourth-largest country on earth by land area, how does it rank by water area? The same wikipedia page can answer this question. If we take only the top ten countries by land area, the US is fourth again, passing China and falling behind India, Canada, and Russia, in that order. Considering that India is 9.55% water, according to Wikipedia, and that I cannot name a single lake in that country, I think perhaps India is reporting vast swathes of the Indian ocean as its territory (which is the sort of thing the US also likes to do, but is kind enough to part out as a separate number). Canada, on the other hand, is as honest as you would expect and has 8.93% surface water without counting any ocean. Canada has a larger freshwater area than the smallest 163 smallest countries on the planet. This is despite its above-board approach on an overabundance of lakes, cutting the Hudson Bay and all territorial waters from the count. If we re-include the 1,600,000 square km of Hudson Bay and 200,000 square km of coastal waters, the total water area of Canada is larger than all but the seven largest countries' land area. Canada has more water than Kazakhstan has land, and that should make Kazakhstan a little uncomfortable.
The United States is third in total water area after Canada and Russia.
The Marshall Islands is first in water area percentage, with 98.47% of its territory being Pacific Ocean, obviously.
Lesotho is 0.0032% surface water and yet makes most of its money selling water to South Africa.
And if you're being non-idiotic, the country with the largest area of fresh surface water and percentage of fresh surface water is Denmark, because Greenland (a self-governing Danish territory) is covered with an ice sheet roughly 1,600,000 kilometers square.*

How do each of the states rank against each other? Now we come to a stop-and-pause moment. I know the USGS calculates water area for even ludicrously small communities (Shady Cove is 0.26 square kilometers water), and I can confidently state that the USGS is the best.
Sidebar: what other country on Earth gives away free maps of the entire country that are accurate down to the foot? And we give away NOAA data, Smithsonian visits, library books, and twelve years of education? I like where our head is at.
I would like to guess. I have already found and opened in another tab the actual list of states by water area, but I want to just open a map, pontificate, and be proven utterly wrong. I will choose the top five and bottom five states by water, and I invite you to play along. Come with me on this embarrassing humility exercise.

Top 5 guesses by area:
1 Michigan (doi)
2 Wisconsin
3 Ohio
4 New York
5 Minnesota
(Alaska don't make the cut, but that seems risky)

Bottom 5 guesses by area: uhhhhh
46 Iowa?
47 Arizona . . .
48 Colorado
49 Kansas
50 New Mexico with least.
I am unconfident on every possible metric.

Before I start looking at stats, do you want to play another dumb game? Top by percent?
Top 5 guesses by percentage:
1 Michigan still (doi), and if ocean is counted,
2 Maryland
3 Deleware
4 Rhode Island
5 Wisconsin.
These are no better than a poor gut instinct.

Bottom 5 guesses by percentage is probably so overlapped with bottom by total that it's not worth me embarrassing myself.

The truth exists on the USGS website for the world to see. You didn't cheat, did you? I didn't, but I am gratified to see that ocean counts (the total water coverage is the much higher 7% if coastal waters are included. Oh, wait. Florida. Oh, crap, Hawaii! Too late now. Heartbeats. What's the highest? Lowest? I copied the information from USGS to this handy chart to add rankings**. I'll give myself a point if I even named the state in the wrong order.

True top 5 by area: 2/5
1 Alaska 245,383km square (risky and stupid--ocean counts)
2 Michigan 104,052km square
3 Florida 31,424km square
4 Wisconsin 29,367km square
5 Louisiana 23,761km square

True bottom 5 by area: 2/5 or 3/7
(not counting DC with its 19km square)
44 Colorado 1,170, a second honorable mention45 Iowa 1,077, an honorable mention46 Vermont 1,035km square47 New Hampshire 1,027km square48 Arizona 1,026km square49 New Mexico 757km square50 West Virginia 497km square (oop)

True top 5 by percentage: 3/5 or 4/6
1 Michigan 41.5% (e a t  m y  s h o r t s ,   h a w a i i)
2 Hawaii 41.2%
3 Rhode Island 33.1%
4 Massachussetts 26.1% oh, right, Chesapeake Bay
5 Maryland 21.8%
6 Delaware 21.7%, an honorable mention

True bottom 5 by percentage:
46 Iowa 0.7%47 Kansas 0.6%48 Colorado 0.4%49 Arizona 0.3%50 New Mexico 0.2% water

You will notice that I named all five constituent members of the percentage dryboys, but thought they were area dryboys instead. Vermont!? What about Lake Champlain!? What about Robby Complain? Regardless, some interesting things to notice include Illinois' rank and percent water. It's 25 of 50 and 4.1% water, the closest percentage to the total country's true (not ocean) 3.96%. That's some nice symmetry. (I learn later that my numbers are poorly-informed by USGS rounding. More at the bottom of the page.)
And speaking of symmetry, I decided to calculate each state's true wetness (percentage of surface water) by how many wets it is (total area of surface water). Essentially, what rank would you expect, given how much water (ignoring how much land). This post is already monster long, and I'm just getting into the gritty details that I find the most interesting.

Four states were ranked exactly as you'd expect.
South Carolina rank 21
Kentucky rank 34
Tennessee rank 35 (it's nice that they're next to each other)
Indiana rank 39

Texas was 23 ranks drier than you'd expect given its rank-eight 19,075 square km of water. California, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, and Alaska were all unexpectedly dry for their large water areas, but only 16 (CA) to 10 (AK) ranks too dry. On the other hand, all our tiniest states are so small that street-corner puddles add a percentage of surface water. Rhode Island is 43 ranks wetter than its paltry 1,324 square km of water would suggest. Other big performers include New Hampshire and Vermont, 24 and 22 ranks wetter than expected despite being 46 and 47 for least amount of water overall. Frustrating idiots. Am I writing too much? I like statistics and outliers.

I have ungoogleable questions, as well. What is the largest lake in the state with the smallest area of water? . . . with the lowest percentage of water? Well, the largest area of water in the smallest-area-wet state (outside the Potomac in DC) is Summersville Lake in West Virginia. It has an 11 square km area. Apparently, somebody sunk a boat in the lake to give divers something interesting to see. And, though it's not interesting, someone thought it was worth explaining that the lake's name is unusual because the Corps of Engineers didn't name the lake for the closest town or for a person, but a slightly-further-away town. We all have them to thank for not having to read about Gad Lake.
As for low percentages, it doesn't get much lower than the mega-dry New Mexico. Well, let me tell you about Elephant Butte Reservoir, 147.7 square km of dull glory. That's slightly larger than Disney World's area. It holds the dubious distinction of being the 84th-largest man-made lake in the United States (my guess: Salton Sea the largest? Upon looking it up, I am embarrassed that I just didn't think very hard about the unbelievably vast Missouri-river lakes in the Dakotas. But! Salton is fourth by area and an accident, which is more fun than Oahe). Elephant Butte is named for a volcanic core sticking up from the water, not the stegomastodon skull discovered by a bachelor party in 2014. Also, I seriously doubt the size estimates of this lake, given that it rains less than in the past and we waste more.***

Is there a state that uses more surface water than ground water for drinking/farming/showering/carwashes? Well (haha get it), I can find this USGS website counting surface water use and ground water use, but I don't understand what I'm looking at. Looks like I'm gonna have to read the underlying data in this paper. Crud. It's very old information. Crud! 1995!??! Well, regardless. What's water use like?

Oh, no. My question is garbage; the reverse would have been more interesting. Something more than half the states use more surface water resources than ground water resources. Now the question becomes "why do Nebraska, Kansas, and Arkansas use so much well water, I mean holy crap?"
Let's start with total off-stream consumptive water use so we can get a sense of the scope of the problem. Let's pull the top three and bottom three examples just to see the interesting outliers.

Total off-stream consumptive fresh water use per state
1 California 2.55 x 10^11 gal/day
2 Texas 1.05 x 10^10 gal/day3 Nebraska 7.02 x 10^9 gal/day----
48 Alaska 2.5 x 10^7 gal/day49 Vermont 2.4 x 10^7 gal/day50 Rhode Island 1.9 x 10^7 gal/day

This almost makes sense. California and Texas have a lot of people and agriculture, but Nebraska? Ignore it for now. I'll come back to it. California used 365000 times more water PER DAY than Rhode Island did in 1995. At the time, the population ratio was 32:1. The farm acre ratio (in 2007) was 374:1. Now, say what you will about growing food, but using ~1000 times more water per farm acre than Rhode Island might explain why California is having a water crisis. Now let me tell you the worst news of all. Consumptive fresh water use is a use that is not returned to the water table. It's water that has been respirated by plants, evaporated from a canal, turned into a product, and so on. It's actually non-renewable water use, and California so outstrips the rest of the country on this metric that it's almost panic-laugh-worthy.
That's how we come back to Nebraska. I read further in this 1995 water use report. In Texas, about 1/3 of fresh water use was consumptive. In Vermont, it was about 1/20. In our great American heartland of waving grain and not much else, consumptive (non-replacing) water use represented about 2/3 (66.9%). In Nebraska, the place where boredom goes for vacation, 7/10 (70.2%) of the state's water was pumped up from ground water resources. In Nebraska, America's breadbasket, 92% of total land is farmland. In Nebraska, our nation's collective memory lapse, 71% of total water use was for crop irrigation. In Nebraska, aka the Devil's ironing board, 2.2 trillion gallons of water was pumped from the ground there in 1995. Nebraska,  accounts for nearly a tenth of all United States ground water use. Is there a state that uses more ground water than surface water? Oh, yeah.

The Ogallala Aquifer is an enormous groundwater basin underneath nearly all of the high plains region, including essentially all of Nebraska. When I visited Union College as a senior in high school, the college showed all of us a tourism video that boasted of Nebraska's most alluring qualities. It was a short video and even so they managed to run out of things to say. "Home to the nation's largest underground lake," the narrator crowed. I turned to my friend and said, "Did they just insinuate that the Ogallala is a tourist attraction? It's not a lake. It's saturated dirt." A third of the United States' irrigated land lies over the aquifer. We pull something like ten trillion gallons of water from it every year. The aquifer has lost an estimated 9% volume since 1950, and to replenish the aquifer from empty would take six thousand years of natural rainfall. Is there a state that uses more ground water than surface water? You bet.

I'm not looking into Arkansas because I assume it will sadden me.

Is there a city I can name that is over 25% water area? Over 50%? I will guess five and see what kind of results I get. I doubt there's a list of "Cities with highest water area" but who knows? I might get lucky. To give myself some context, I'll look up a few large cities that I know will be sub-ten percent water. Chicago (3%) New York (35.40% oops why) Saint Louis (6%) and Minneapolis (6%) Saint Paul (7.5%). I guess New York wanted to control their harbors? That was anti-climactic, but I'm not writing to be interesting or compelling. You're along on this journey, discovering as I discover. From my guesses, there are several factors I think will increase a city's total water area. Enclosed lakes are obvious, but few. Enclosed rivers are more likely, but the city has to be small and on both sides of the river, and the river would have to be large. Bays and harbors are even better. So I think that Seattle, San Francisco, Mobile, Boston, and (cough cough) New York are some of my**** best bets for big cities with loads of water area. I'll list and rank them for you.

San Francisco 79.78% (479.14km2 water/600.59km2 total)Boston 45.98% (106.73km2 water/232.14km2 total)Seattle 41.17% (152.0km2 water/369.2km2 total)New York City 35.40% (429.53km2 water/1,213.37km2 total)Mobile 22.58% (105.31km2 water/466.34km2 total)

Mobile doesn't encircle the bay like I hoped. On the other hand, San Francisco has been as greedy as I assumed it would be. Congratulations, SF, for artificially lowering your per-kilometer population density. I thought breaking the 25% mark would be difficult. Nope.

Correction:
Wow, a pre-publication correction? Yes. I am not editing this document in any way. So, why did I do all that work when Wikipedia lists everything in easily-parseable tables? Because errors are my friends. Come to find out, Nebraska and Nevada are both drier than Iowa in %, which frustrates me, but what are you going to do?

*Antarctica isn't a country. At 98% coverage, that's 13,720,000 square km of ice. So.
**I made a useless table because Wikipedia made it first.
***I wonder--in drought years--how the rankings of the water surface area of various reservoir-dependent states changes. Elephant Butte loses something like 80 to 90% of its surface area in a drought like the one pictured above. I might have to call the Corps of Engineers and do some legitimate research to find that one out.
****Bron came over and guessed New Orleans, which is over 50% water.