Tuesday, April 13, 2010: 11:45 a.m.
Continental C (Westin Tabor Center, Denver)
The federal Advisory Committee on Water Information (ACWI) is directed by the Office of Management and Budget to foster collaboration related to water information collection and sharing among federal agencies and the non-federal sector. The Subcommittee on Ground Water (SOGW) is a subgroup of ACWI that has developed and is encouraging implementation of a long-term, nationwide groundwater quantity and quality monitoring framework. The overall goal is for the national-scale network to provide the data necessary for the planning, management, and development of groundwater supplies to meet current and future water needs, including ecosystem requirements. ACWI has approved the SOGW report “A National Framework for Ground Water Monitoring in the United States”, which proposes a National Ground Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN). NGWMN pilot projects recently have been established. This presentation provides an update on the activities of the pilot projects.
Pilot projects were selected to represent single-state programs with different levels of intrastate-agency coordination, and multi-state collaborations monitoring multi-state aquifer(s). These pilots will serve to test the concepts outlined in the NGWMN, and produce information with which to evaluate the network’s feasibility. Information gained from the pilot projects will be incorporated into the Implementation Phase of the NGWMN. Pilot projects will evaluate the distribution of existing wells within principal and major aquifers, well measurement and/or sampling frequency, field practices, data elements stored in their environmental database(s), data management procedures and their documentation, and overall network costs. A key component of the network will be development of a web-based data portal prototype, which will serve data from the participating groups to the analysts requesting network data. Pilot programs also will be evaluating the efficacy of sharing data through the data portal.
Pilot projects were selected to represent single-state programs with different levels of intrastate-agency coordination, and multi-state collaborations monitoring multi-state aquifer(s). These pilots will serve to test the concepts outlined in the NGWMN, and produce information with which to evaluate the network’s feasibility. Information gained from the pilot projects will be incorporated into the Implementation Phase of the NGWMN. Pilot projects will evaluate the distribution of existing wells within principal and major aquifers, well measurement and/or sampling frequency, field practices, data elements stored in their environmental database(s), data management procedures and their documentation, and overall network costs. A key component of the network will be development of a web-based data portal prototype, which will serve data from the participating groups to the analysts requesting network data. Pilot programs also will be evaluating the efficacy of sharing data through the data portal.