The USGS has a distributed water database that is locally managed. Surface
water, ground water, and water quality data are rolled up from these
local, distributed databases into a national information system. The
ground-water database contains records from about 850,000 wells that have
been compiled during the course of ground-water hydrology studies over the
past 100 years. Information from these wells is served via the Internet
through NWISWeb, the National Water Information System Web Interface.
NWISWeb provides all USGS ground-water data that are approved for public
release. This large number of sites is excellent for some uses, but
complicates retrievals when the user is interested in specific networks,
or wells in an active water-level measurement program.
These web sites group related wells and data from these active well
networks, and provide basic statistics about the water-level data
collected by USGS water science centers for Cooperative Program, Federal
Program, and supplied to us by our customers through cooperative
agreements.
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