5 ms·
Ah yes, since we all have an intuitive grasp of what millions of gallons, and can visualize what that means over however many 40 acre farms.
by kevinpet 3y ago
Ah yes, since we all have an intuitive grasp of what millions of gallons, and can visualize what that means over however many 40 acre farms.
- epistasis 3y agoBut your equipment for handling water is almost certainly going to measure things in terms of volume/minute, where the volume unit will not be acre-feet. Perhaps it's gallons. Or hogsheads. The acre-foot is a useful measure only for certain scales of volumes, but there's a need to convert between small and large scales of volumes all the time. If we didn't have the metric system, sure, the acre-foot makes sense to use. And in the metric system, perhaps people will occasionally talk in terms of hectare-cm instead of liters or m^3 (I don't know enough about non-US water systems to know what they typically use). But regardless of liters or m^3 or hectare-cm, these can all be converted by moving a decimal point rather than multiplication or division with multiple significant figures. We have a better system, we have just chosen not to use it.