Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Skip to content

Quality assurance of water levels in the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer in Louisiana from the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources' Strategic Online Natural Resources Information System (SONRIS)

Metadata Updated: July 20, 2024

This data release provides several data files representing groundwater levels reported through driller's reports for the State of Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, 2023) within or near the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (MAP) and (or) associated with the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer (MRVA). First, a retrieval of data from the State of Louisiana was made and manual preparatory filtering including complete information of location, date, water level (depth below land surface) and water level altitude in feet, and general association with the MAP or MRVA. Further manual and digitally-assisted inspection was made to confirm that the data were not already within the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Information System (NWIS) (U.S. Geological Survey, 2023). The agency code for the water levels has been assigned "LA018" (Louisiana Department of Natural Resources) in accordance with the https://help.waterdata.usgs.gov/codes-and-parameters/code/agency_cd_query?fmt=html (accessed February 28, 2023). Use of the LA018 agency code is consistent with historical and current USGS storage practices in NWIS when in collaboration with the State of Louisiana. This first data file is titled "LADNR_drillers_working.csv" (6,374 records). Second, that data file was processed through data structure conversion software (infoGW2visGWDB) (Asquith and Seanor, 2019) and in particular removal of well locations plotting outside the MAP boundary (Painter and Westerman, 2023) was made. The resultant but transient data structure of 4,855 of the original 6,374 records was given over to quality-control and assurance using statistical modeling (visGWDBmrva software) (Asquith and others, 2019, 2020). The statistical analyses result in formation of a regional statistical time series models using generalized additive models (GAMs) and support vector machines (SVMs). Some 18 records by horizontal position having a missing altitude of the bottom of the MRVA and zero records having water-level altitudes below the bottom of the MRVA when digitally working with the Torak and Painter (2019) surface of the MRVA bottom. These 18 records are retained through the workflow described herein to avoid potential scientific interpretation of hydrogeologic framework. In summary, for each of the 4,855 well-water-level records (or rather in detail, each unique well identifier), the visGWDBmrva software isolated all water levels for the MAP/MRVA from USGS (2023) within 16 kilometers radial distance. This means that the driller's dataset is being internally compared to itself and USGS MAP/MRVA data. The visGWDBmrva software computed a "pseudo water level" from a blending of GAM and SVM model predictions for the date of the driller's recorded water level. These computations are all created on-the-fly. A residual was computed from the pseudo water level (as altitude) to that water-level altitude reported for the well-water-level record of the driller's dataset. These statistical results are listed the file titled "LADNR_retained_levels.csv" (4,744 records) for which records were retained LADNR_drillers_working.csv if the absolute value of the residual of the well-water-level record and the pseudo water level was less than or equal to 20 feet. This threshold resulted from exploratory review of the statistical computations and is consistent with Smith and others (2020) and Weber and others (2021) for a similar driller's reported dataset for the Missouri part of the MAP/MRVA. The results listed in file LADNR_retained_levels.csv are deemed especially suitable for greater statistical modeling of groundwater levels in the MRVA (Asquith and Killian, 2022).

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date July 20, 2024
Metadata Updated Date July 20, 2024

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI EDI

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date July 20, 2024
Metadata Updated Date July 20, 2024
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
@Id http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/a92981ae03a1ac138b78601023bd5fe2
Identifier USGS:653fdaaad34ee4b6e05bc624
Data Last Modified 20240214
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://datainventory.doi.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 9937b1ab-0766-4efb-a150-e0f6de64416d
Harvest Source Id 52bfcc16-6e15-478f-809a-b1bc76f1aeda
Harvest Source Title DOI EDI
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -92.2333,29.1158,-89.9108,32.9881
Publisher Hierarchy White House > U.S. Department of the Interior > U.S. Geological Survey
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 4373652ce05a0c33e0641012f4c8787a49b365b19238e2f167f35e29403a081f
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -92.2333, 29.1158, -92.2333, 32.9881, -89.9108, 32.9881, -89.9108, 29.1158, -92.2333, 29.1158}

Didn't find what you're looking for? Suggest a dataset here.