Ground Water
Ground-water studies focused primarily on the sand and gravel outwash deposits. In the MIAM, these studies were in the Buried Valley Aquifer System, a major source of drinking water in the Dayton/Springfield/Cincinnati area. In the WHIT, the sand and gravel outwash deposits were along some of the larger river systems. Ground-water studies were designed to measure water quality in:
- High-capacity supply wells next to large streams (supply wells)
- Domestic wells screened at various depths in the aquifer (subunit study wells)
- Shallow ground water in areas overlain by agricultural or urban land use (agricultural or urban land-use wells)
- Till-plain wells in shallow ground water in areas overlain by agricultural land use; the wells were within sand lenses in the impermeable till plain.
- Areas undisturbed by human activities (reference wells).
Constituents sampled in the ground-water networks include nutrients, heavily used pesticides, major ions, trace elements, dissolved organic carbon, major metabolites of triazines and acetanalides.
During Cycle II (2001-2010) of the NAWQA Program, some of these well networks are scheduled to be resampled to determine trends in water quality. For a limited number of networks, a subset of wells are scheduled to be sampled quarterly to measure seasonal variation in water quality in ground water. The quarterly sampling is scheduled for 2005 for the agricutural land-use network (whitluscr1) in the till plain and in the MIAM urban land-use network (miamlusrc1). Five wells from two other networks are scheduled to be sampled one time to measure changes between samples collected in 2000. These networks are the MIAM subunit (miamsus1) study and in the MIAM agricultural land-use network (miamluscr1). In Cycle III (2010-), the MIAM subunit study and the MIAM agricultural land-use network would also be scheduled to be sampled quarterly.