THE BLACK HILLS ATLAS OF AQUIFER SUSCEPTIBILITY AND VULNERABILITY

The West Dakota Water Development District has been funding a number of small projects to determine aquifer susceptibility and vulnerability in 7.5-minute quadrangles near Rapid City, South Dakota. Several students have been working on these quads for the past 6-7 years, generating a variety of formats and procedures, and to date the resulting maps have not been generally available except as thesis plates. We are designing an atlas of consistently produced and formatted aquifer maps for the quadrangles that will be distributed online through the new GeoPDF format adopted by the United States Geological Survey. A GeoPDF is similar to a standard PDF file readable with Adobe Reader, but it contains map layers that can be turned on and off individually to provide an interactive map environment for the user to view, zoom in/out, and print the map. A free toolbar download can be installed in Adobe Reader to implement additional functions within the GeoPDF. The maps are being produced in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment, and a consistent framework for the underlying GIS databases is being developed alongside consistent GIS analysis parameters and techniques. All data will have complete metadata documentation. A series of maps including aquifer susceptibility, aquifer vulnerability, structure contour and depth to formation are generated for each quadrangle. Additionally, a series of larger compilations will be made available such as a strip map showing the structural contours for Blackhawk, Rapid City West, and Rockerville quadrangles. This work has also included the collection and organization of domestic water well production figures and related data for use in GIS analyses. The maps will made available and distributed to the public online at http://aquifers.sdsmt.edu.