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USGS Groundwater Data for Washington

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Current Conditions
(6 sites)

Current conditions at selected sites based on the most recent data from on-site automated recording equipment. Measurements are commonly recorded at a fixed interval of 15- to 60-minutes and transmitted to the USGS every hour. Values may include "Approved" (quality-assured data that may be published) and/or more recent "Provisional" data (of unverified accuracy and subject to revision). Most current data are provisional.

Historical Observations
(80 sites)

The same data accessed by the Current Conditions link above but including both active and discontinued sites with data for any part of the period October 1, 2007, through the present. Values may include "Approved" (quality-assured data that may be published) and/or more recent "Provisional" data (of unverified accuracy and subject to revision).

Daily Data
(17 sites)

Summary of all data for each day for the period of record and may represent the daily mean, median, maximum, minimum, and/or other derived value. Values may include "Approved" (quality-assured data that may be published) and/or more recent "Provisional" data (of unverified accuracy and subject to revision).

Statistics
(12 sites)

Statistics are computed from approved daily mean data at each site. These links provide summaries of approved historical daily values for daily, monthly, and annual (water year or calendar year) time periods.

Field Measurements
(76,036 sites)
Manual measurements of depth to water in wells.
Introduction

The U.S. Geological Survey has been investigating ground-water resources in the State of Washington since the early part of the 20th Century. During this time the use of ground-water evolved from meager domestic and stock water needs to the current complex requirements for public-water supplies, large irrigation projects, industrial plants and numerous other uses. Ground-water data are of considerable importance in determining water availability, allocating irrigation water, locating sources of pollution, and numerous other resource-management decisions.

Ground-water Data in Washington

As of June 2004, the ground-water database for Washington contained descriptive site information for about 86,000 ground-water sites in Washington. The database contains water-level measurements for about 72,400 ground-water sites and water-level measurements for one real-time site in Washington. The water-quality database for Washington contains data and information on chemical, physical, and biological properties of ground water from about 9,336 ground-water sites in Washington.

These data represent a combination of measured (by USGS personnel) and reported information collected by many other federal, state, and local agencies; Tribal Nations; and numerous private and public organizations. The data has been collected and entered for a wide variety of projects and purposes over a long period of time and the resulting database varies in quality and detail.

Although many ground-water wells have accurate information (especially those field visited for use in recent projects), some problems are known to exist for older entries. Examples of known problems include, but are not limited to, inaccurate well locations, old information regarding the use of the water from the well, and incorrect installation dates. Many wells in the database have not been field visited, but were entered into the database from the well drillers' reports, using general location information supplied by the drillers.

This database does not represent all the wells in Washington State and all the information in the database is provisional and subject to revision. Data for these and other ground-water sites in Washington is also available from the Washington State Department of Ecology Well Log database.