Wyoming's Groundwater Resources
Water is Wyoming’s most important natural resource, more valuable over the long term than the fossil fuels that drive our state’s economy at present, for water is essential to life, and water scarcity is an inevitable consequence of increasing population and changing climate. The study of our groundwater is necessary because we need to understand and predict the rate of use that would change our groundwater from a renewable to a non-renewable resource: when drawdown results in the lithologic compaction of an aquifer, the aquifer cannot be fully recharged. And, in practical terms, drawdown entails more and more costly production and treatment, so we are also gauging an economically renewable or non-renewable resource.
Our ultimate objective is a means of predicting the quality and quantity of groundwater that could be produced from a given hydrogeologic unit anywhere in Wyoming; our ultimate goal is the integration of the elements of this means, to protect the renewability of the resource. We approach our objective and goal along a continuum of cyclical effort [collect data, reduce data, process data to model parameters, visualize modeled parameters, refine model; collect data…]; and, for each area of the state, we describe our progress in steps, a series of reports, each report a compilation of the data available at its time of writing, each based on available methods of data analysis.
Download River Basin Plan Reports
View Reports by River Basin
Click here to view references for the WWDC Green River Basin Water Plan II – Groundwater study Level I (2007–2009).