Water
The newly compiled KGS "High Plains Aquifer Atlas" is now online. It features more than 70 maps—several animated or interactive. One provides real-time data from wells continuously monitored by the KGS and another allows users to watch the progressive change in water levels since 1996. The High Plains aquifer, a massive network of water-bearing formations that underlies parts of eight states, includes the extensive Ogallala aquifer and is the primary source of municipal, industrial, and irrigation water for much of western and central Kansas. Declines in the High Plains aquifer of western Kansas continue to dominate much of the KGS work on water.
To monitor the condition of the High Plains aquifer, the KGS and the Division of Water Resources (DWR) of the Kansas Department of Agriculture measure groundwater levels, with landowner permission, in about 1,400 wells in 47 western and central Kansas counties every January. The results are available online via the WIZARD database. The KGS also provides a Kansas Master Groundwater Well Inventory (MWI)—a central repository that imports and links together the state's primary groundwater well data sets—and continuously monitors and collects data from three western Kansas wells as part of its index-well program. The KGS releases the real-time data from the index wells through the High Plains Aquifer Atlas.
The KGS recently completed a modeling study of the High Plains aquifer in southwestern Kansas for the area in GMD 3, one of the state's five Groundwater Management Districts. The model is used by Kansas water agencies to assess the impact of pumping reductions on groundwater availability in that portion of the aquifer. The U.S. Department of Energy is funding another KGS project on the integrated use of surface and subsurface nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for measuring and mapping saturated hydraulic conductivity in three dimensions. The U.S. Geological Survey helped fund a KGS study on aquifer storage and recovery in near-surface aquifers through the development of a new recharge approach using small-diameter low-cost wells. The KGS also continues work with Michigan State University and others as part of an NSF-funded study to model the entire High Plains aquifer.
A range of water-level and water-well information is available through the KGS website and the Data Resources Library in Lawrence. Inquiries for these data have increased due to ongoing drought conditions in the state and concerns over water-level declines in the High Plains aquifer. With KGS support, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment released a program that allows online submission of digital water-well drilling records.
Read more about this topic: Kansas Geological Survey
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