Groundwater

The Ogallala-High Plains fringe area has few monitoring wells with historical data. In an effort to improve the water level data coverage, the Basin Management Team added nearly 100 wells. These wells were added to the annual monitoring network in northwest Kansas in January 2004. A few of these wells are in areas that have over 100 feet of saturated thickness. That is uncommon to this area.

The Basin Management Team measures water levels in the Ogallala-High Plains fringe areas throughout western Kansas. There are 156 wells measured annually. The Team collects additional water level measurements tri-annually, in the winter, spring and fall.  Only winter measurements are used for the Ogallala-High Plains Water Level Charts. Groundwater pumping influences winter measurements the least. These include measurements in December, January and February.