Today's factoid

According to Google, 1 acre-foot is equivalent to 1 233 481.84 liters.

The silly unit of acre-feet popped up today in a paper that I was reading so I had to look it up. I'm feeling glad that Canada made the conversion over to metric.

Comments

Google sure is great that way, with unit conversions. I use its calculator all the time. But the best website about units is the one by Russ Rowlett . The acre-foot is actually a sensible unit; it means a lot more to me than a million litres. I can imagine an acre-sized field with a foot of water standing on it better.

In some contexts something like acre-feet makes sense, but in this particular case they were dealing with the annual water consumption of a certain population and thus dealing with relatively high numbers. In that situation a unit like cubic kilometres might have worked reasonably well.

I guess my main complaint though was about that lack of easy unit conversion that is offered in metric (eg. 1 acre-foot is approximately 42 million US fluid ounces, whereas 1 cubic kilometre is precise 1 billion cubic metres).