MAPPING AQUIFERS ALONG THE MIDDLE RIO GRANDE BASIN

The Middle Rio Grande Basin plays a huge part in the lives of New Mexican people and many more. This basin is the source of drinking water, and is widely used for agriculture along the entire length of the Rio Grande. Even with the demand placed on the water resources in this region, a current map of groundwater depth and extent does not exist for the Middle Rio Grande region. This lack of data creates problems for the people of New Mexico including uncertainty when drilling new wells or determining the life span of existing wells. The depth to groundwater maps created for this project will provide everyday people with accessible data, while also providing information beneficial to water managers and decision makers in the basin. A depth to water map was created through analysis of wells logs from the New Mexico State Engineers website and depth to water observations from the United States Geological Survey. The tabular data from these sources was first analyzed for location accuracy, and then for trends in depth to water over time. A single, representative, depth to water value was selected for each location and then plotted spatially in ArcGIS Pro. Using the Topo to Raster tool the point observations were converted to a raster image of depth to water from north of Albuquerque to Truth of Consequences along the Rio Grande. The final resulting map, showing contoured depth to water data, will be incorporated into New Mexico Bureau of Geology ongoing research such as the creation of a hydrogeology atlas of New Mexico, analyzing aquifer storage and recovery potential, and uploaded as Google Earth KMZ files for ease of public access.