Project Summary:

Assessing the quality of the nation's drinking water supply requires basic information on wells, intakes, and populations dependent upon them. Recognizing this need, the National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program initiated a program in 2004 to create a national NAWQA database using the National Water Information System (NWIS) water-use database, the Site-specific Water-Use Database System (SWUDS). The NAWQA-SWUDS database will link information on water-quality data collected and analyzed through a variety of programs with the water resources and populations affected.

To create NAWQA-SWUDS, data were retrieved from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) database and quality assured for information on drinking water resource type (for example, reservoir), resource name (for example, Lake Huron), latitude/longitude location, and type of source (for example, intake, well, or spring) for all 50 States. The data for ground-water sources were matched with data in the NWIS Ground-Water Site Inventory (GWSI) database in each of the 48 conterminous USGS Water Science Centers and, in some states, matched with aquifer and well construction data in State databases. After all data sets are integrated and reformatted, they are submitted to the NAWQA-SWUDS database. Currently (2005), public supply source data for 28 States have been entered into SWUDS. The remaining States are undergoing their final reformatting and will be submitted to NAWQA-SWUDS in 2006.