Pumpage for the transient ground-water flow model, Death Valley regional ground-water flow system, Nevada and California
Description
This digital data set represents ground-water discharged from the Death Valley regional ground-water
flow system (DVRFS) through pumped wells. Pumping from wells in the transient flow model of the
DVRFS is simulated using the Multi-Node Well (MNW) package for MODFLOW-2000 (Halford and
Hanson, 2002). In the DVRFS region wells typically are completed with screens that span multiple
aquifers and thus multiple layers in the model. The MNW package uses the hydraulic conductivity
and thickness to determine how much of the well pumpage is derived from each model layer. Estimated
pumpage for the period 1913-98 (San Juan and others, 2004) was simulated as the total pumpage of
wells in each model cell. This resulted in 8,569 wells being simulated by pumping in 432 cells ("Larger
Work Citation", Chapter F, table F-5). The area simulated by the DVRFS transient ground-water flow
model is an approximately 45,000 square-kilometer region of southern Nevada and California. The
DVRFS transient ground-water flow model is one of the most recent in a number of regional-scale
models developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
to support investigations at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) and at Yucca Mountain, Nevada (see "Larger
Work Citation", Chapter A, page 8).