| Summary: | A paper to be presented at the American Society of Civil Engineers Second Water Resources Engineering Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 13, 1963. === Water is a vital commodity in the West and especially in the South -west. Yet approximately 23.6 million acre-feet of water is estimated to be lost by evaporation from water surfaces in the seventeen Western States. Of this amount, it has been estimated that approximately 3.4 million acre-feet is lost from small reservoirs (7). A promising method of conserving part of this water is through the suppression of evaporation by means of monomolecular films of
long-chain fatty alcohols, such a hexadecanol (C-16) and octadecanol (C-18), spread on the water surface. Films of these materials are not toxic to animals or plants, and they offer no appreciable resistance to oxygen or carbon dioxide diffusion.
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