High-resolution monthly sectoral water demands for the U.S. over 1980-2100

Cameron Bracken , Hassan Niazi, Travis Thurber, Isaac Thompson, Kazi Tamaddun, Hisham Eldardiry, Kendall Mongird, Nathalie Voisin, Ning Sun, Jennie Rice

U.S. water demand varies sharply by sector and region as land use, population, weather patterns, and economic activity co-evolve. High-resolution water demand data are required to capture these dynamics and to support integrated energy-water-land modeling and local-to-regional water scarcity assessments. We present a gridded (1/8$^{\circ}$), monthly, multi-sector water demand dataset for the contiguous United States (CONUS) covering 1980--2100 across one historical period and eight future scenarios spanning a wide but plausible range of atmospheric conditions, emissions constraints, and economic, technological, and population growth assumptions. The dataset covers six demand sectors --- irrigation, thermoelectric, municipal (public-supply and domestic), livestock, manufacturing, and mining --- aggregated from 25 underlying subsectors, separately for withdrawals and consumption, and includes per-cell groundwater and surface-water source attributions. The historical record is validated against the United States Geological Survey (USGS) 2010--2020 water-use reanalysis for the three largest sectors at the Hydrologic Unit Code 6 (HUC6) scale, with Pearson correlations from 0.73 to 0.95. The dataset advances prior global products through state-resolved sectoral demands, future power-plant siting projections, scenario-consistent population and land-use forcing, and a spatial-resolution refinement from 1/2$^{\circ}$ to 1/8$^{\circ}$.