National Ground Water Monitoring Network Data Portal of the Federal Advisory Committee on Water Information Subcommittee on Ground Water

This page serves as a gateway to a pilot U.S. National Ground Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN) data portal developed as part of a NGWMN pilot study. The Network Portal can be accessed here or by clicking the image below.

Information about the NGWMN and the Pilot study, definitions of terms used in the portal follow, and links to related websites follow.

Disclaimer: Please note that this is a beta version of the Pilot NGWMN Data Portal, which is still undergoing development and testing. Should you encounter any bugs, glitches, lack of functionality or other problems with the, please contact the site administrator immediately so they can rectify these accordingly. Your help in this regard is greatly appreciated.

All information published herein is gathered from sources which are thought to be reliable, but the user should not assume that the information is official or final. The NGWMN Data Portal does not assume responsibility for errors, and all information is subject to change without notice.

The goal of the National Ground Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN) is to provide information needed for planning, management, and development of ground-water supplies to meet current and future water needs and ecosystem requirements. This will be accomplished by aggregating suitable ground-water data from local, state, and federal organizations. A consensus-based framework document (http://acwi.gov/sogw/pubs/tr/index.html) was developed to provide guidance to ensure that the data are comparable and can be included in a nationally consistent network. The framework design focuses on providing information needed to assess the quantity of ground-water reserves as constrained by quality. The scale of the network will focus on Principal and Major Aquifers of the United States.

Five Pilots tested the concepts outlined in the Framework document for the NGWMN. The Pilot areas were the Mahomet-Teays aquifer in Illinois and Indiana, the Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer in southeastern Minnesota, and statewide aquifers in Montana, New Jersey, and Texas.

A pilot Network portal was developed using data from the 5 pilots and included data contributed by 9 organizations. An important aspect of the Network portal is that the portal is not an aggregated database of data from all participants, but it is a gateway to the data as it is maintained and served by each participating organization. Original data are retrieved from each data provider by the portal in real time. The portal is capable of displaying water levels, well logs, and water quality in tabular or graphical formats and allows the user to bulk download all of the available data.

Users may select water-level and water-quality wells by subnetwork and based on the Agency collecting the data or the Principal aquifer. Most wells are classified into "Background", "Suspected/Anticipated Change" or "Known Changes" subnetworks. Within these subnetworks, wells are categorized as either "Trend" or "Surveillance", based on the monitoring frequency. The definitions of these terms are given below:

Background:

Monitoring points that provide data from aquifers or parts of aquifers with no (or minimal) anthropogenic effects. These are from areas that have been minimally affected by human activities and are expected to remain so.

Suspected/Anticipated changes:

Monitoring points that provide data from aquifers or parts of aquifers that may have been affected by man's activity, but that is not documented or conclusive. These wells may also be in areas where changes are anticipated. These may be areas with withdrawals are occurring or where land-use has changed, but the effect has not yet been clearly identified.

Known Changes:

Monitoring points that provide data from aquifers that

1.   (1) are known to be heavily pumped,
2.   (2) have experienced substantial recharge-altering land-use changes, or
3.   (3) are located in areas with managed ground-water resources,
4.   (4) are known to have degraded water quality from human activities, or
5.   (5) are in an area expected to soon be developed.

Trend:

Wells that are generally monitored to determine changes over time. The frequency of monitoring depends on the hydrologic conditions of the aquifer and can range from daily data to annual data.

Surveillance:

Surveillance monitoring would be used in conjunction with Trend monitoring to periodically report on the overall water-level and water-quality conditions, or status, of the Nation's ground-water resources. NGWMN surveillance monitoring can be thought of as a periodic "census" of ground-water level and quality. An overall snapshot of ground-water conditions in an aquifer is obtained with Surveillance monitoring. The frequency of Surveillance monitoring generally is much less than Trend monitoring.

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