9 States That Are Less Than 1% Water

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 7:21AM EST · Published Jun 1, 9:50AM EDT

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9 States That Are Less Than 1% Water — © Thinkstock

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and U.S. Census Bureau combine their resources to measure what portion of each state is land and what is water. The water portion of nine states is less than 1%.

USGS researchers wrote in their study on the matter, “These water area data represent the sum of inland and coastal water and the Great Lakes.” The writers posed the questions:

What percent of your state do you think is water covered? Which state has the highest percentage of water area? Is the West really “drier” than the rest of the country?

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The measurement takes into account total square mileage of each state, land area square miles and water-covered square miles, to yield the percentage area of water. The U.S. total figure is 7%.

The nine states: New Mexico (0.2%), Arizona (0.3%), Colorado (0.4%), Kansas (0.6%), Iowa (0.7%), Nebraska (0.7%), Wyoming (0.7%), Nevada (0.7%) and West Virginia (0.8%). Since the figure has nothing to do with all water available for human and agricultural use, some of the states on the list have little or no drought problems. (Drought-plagued California’s figure is 4.8%.)

The list at the other end of the spectrum shows the effects of the Great Lakes and coastal waters. Michigan is the state most rich in water area at 41.5%, with Hawaii barely behind at 41.2%. The balance of the top 10 are Rhode Island (33.1%), Massachusetts (26.1%), Maryland (21.8%), Delaware (21.7%), Florida (18.5%), Louisiana (17.5%), Wisconsin (17.3%) and New Jersey (15.7%).

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Methodology: The area measurements were derived from the Census Bureau’s Master Address File/Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (MAF/TIGER) database. The boundaries of the states and equivalent areas are as of January 1, 2010. The land and water areas, including their classifications, reflect base feature updates made in the MAF/TIGER database through August 2010. The area measurements, in square kilometers and square miles, are for statistical purposes only.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.