Western Nevada is one of the driest places in the United States, with an average annual rainfall of about seven inches. Don’t let The Big Dump snowstorms of 2005 fool you. We need all the water we can get to keep our greenery from turning a lovely shade of Shredded Wheat brown.

Luckily, there are a lot of smart people out there who are finding new ways to help us use less water and to water smarter. One of those water wizards is Bill Carlos, horticulturist with University of Nevada, Reno Cooperative Extension. In collaboration with Dr. Wally Miller and Dr. George Fernandez, also of UNR, Carlos is participating in the Washoe Evapotranspiration Project.

The project is sponsored by local water entities, UNR, and the Desert Research Institute. Truckee Meadows Water Authority plays a key role in gathering project data.

So, besides being a mouthful of syllables, what is evapotranspiration, or ET, for short?

“It’s simply the two ways in which water is lost from the earth,” Carlos says. “Evaporation we’re all familiar with. Transpiration is how plants, grass included, lose water through small openings on the underside of each leaf, called stomata.”

In other words, transpiration is how a plant sweats.

So what does all this have to do with the price of fescue and water to keep it green? In the WET project, ET data is collected at weather stations and this data is fed to satellites that relay information to devices called “smart irrigation controllers,” which adjust watering amounts and scheduling based on the precise weather and climate data it receives.

“We have found that most peoplewater anywhere from twice to 10 times the amount they need to,” Carlos says. “We estimate you can save 12 to 25 percent on your water use with this system. The cost of water is going up all the time, and systems like these make good economic and environmental sense.”

Thanks to people like Bill Carlos and his colleagues, WET is looking up to the clouds and beyond, bringing knowledge all the way down to the grass-roots level. Literally.

For more information, visit washoeet.dri.com or call 784-4848.