← Back to DatasetsDataset

Groundwater elevation data for monitoring wells within the East and Taylor River basins, Colorado (USA)

Creators: Kenneth Williams, Curtis BeutlerORCID, Austin Shirley, Alex Newman, Matthias SprengerORCID, Lijing Wang
Year: 2025
DOI: 10.15485/2575230
License: CC-BY 4.0
Location: The East River (ER) is a snow‐dominated, headwater basin of the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB) located in the western United States. The ER is the designated testbed of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC Accelerator Laboratory's Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (WFSFA). This portion of the ER watershed contains the project-defined boundaries of East River, Washington Gulch, Slate River, and Coal Creek, as described in the location metadata. Through WFSFA, observational networks have been established to measure stream discharge and precipitation chemistry. The ER is considered representative of many snow‐dominated headwaters of the Rocky Mountains. The study domain encompasses nearly 85 square km, a 1.4‐km vertical drop in elevation (4,120 to 2,760 m) and pristine alpine, subalpine, montane, and riparian ecosystems. The ER contains high‐energy mountain streams to low‐energy meandering floodplains and is eroding primarily into the Cretaceous, carbon‐rich, marine shale of the Mancos Formation. This data package contains geographic metadata for specific observation points throughout the watershed. Additional metadata on specific locations within the watershed are provided in the following related data package: Varadharajan C. et al. (2025) doi:10.15485/1660962
Temporal extent: 2016-11-30 to 2025-01-23
Bounding box: 38.820°N to 39.033°N, -107.120°W to -106.880°W
Publisher: ESS_DIVE
Tags: EARTH SCIENCE > TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE > GROUND WATER, CATEGORICAL:GCMD EARTH SCIENCE > TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE > GROUND WATER > GROUND WATER FEATURES > WATER TABLE > WATER TABLE DEPTH, VARIABLE:GCMD ESS-DIVE File Level Metadata Reporting Format, ESS-DIVE CSV File Formatting Guidelines Reporting Format, ESS-DIVE Location Metadata Reporting Format, Wildlife Behavior, Alpine & Subalpine Ecology, Hydrology & Watersheds, Snow & Ice, Groundwater, Geology & Tectonics, Soil Science, Geochemistry & Isotopes, Weather & Atmospheric Science, Mining & Mineral Resources, Gunnison Basin, Research Programs

Description

This dataset is comprised of temporal variations in groundwater elevation data for the 24 monitoring wells located throughout the East River watershed. Seasonal to annual variations in groundwater elevations are a critical property of mountainous watersheds needed to understand both hydrological and below ground biogeochemical processes. Such data serve as a critical constraint for numerical models describing coupled groundwater-surface water behavior within the watershed. Additionally, the offset between the maximum and minimum groundwater elevations defines the extent of the bedrock weathering zone, with annual excursions in the groundwater hydrographic (i.e., the rising and falling hydrographic limbs) imposing primary controls on bedrock saturation state and redox conditions that govern biogeochemical reactions impacting nitrogen, carbon, and metals cycling. Manufacturer-specific software is used to download pressure data from each transducer, with broadly available spreadsheet software (e.g. Microsoft Excel) used to convert temporal variations in water pressure to elevations in units of meters above mean sea level. As additional monitoring wells are installed within the East River watershed and new groundwater monitoring wells are installed in the Taylor River watershed, temporal groundwater elevation data will be included as a part of this master dataset. Details regarding the metadata associated with each monitoring well location, including well depths, screened intervals, well location coordinates, and bedrock type, are included, as is a standard operating procedure for generating groundwater elevation data from water pressure values recorded by the pressure transducers. This dataset includes: (1) a zip file (East_River_Watershed_Compiled_Groundwater_Elevation_Data_Plots.zip), containing (a) PNG of groundwater hydrographs, (b) a CSV file with groundwater elevation data, and (c) CSV file containing metadata organized by location; (2) an Excel file (East_River_Watershed_Compiled_Groundwater_Elevation_Data_Plots.xlsx) with the groundwater elevation data, groundwater hydrographs, and metadata organized by location; (3) a Word file (Groundwater_elevation_data_protocols.docx) and a PDF file version (Groundwater_elevation_data_protocols.pdf) containing field protocols and methods; (4) a location metadata (locations.csv) file; (5) a file level metadata (flmd.csv); and (6) data dictionary (dd.csv) file. This work was supported by the Watershed Function Science Focus Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Local Knowledge Graph (9 entities)

Loading graph...