Fauquier County Groundwater Resource Assessment and Monitoring Study

Issue

Conducted in cooperation with

Fauquier County is a rapidly growing suburban area 50 miles from Washington, D.C. that includes parts of three distinct geologic provinces: (1) the Blue Ridge, (2) the Culpeper Basin, and (3) the Piedmont. All 3.9 Mgal/day of public and private water supplies in Fauquier County are extracted from aquifers by groundwater wells tapping unique rocks in each of the three provinces (Maupin and others, 2014). As urban and rural growth continues, aquifers will continued to be developed to supplement current withdrawals.

Regional- and local-scale data and interpretations are needed by County and State agencies to manage groundwater resources in Fauquier County. The additional information must be easily translated into tools that policy makers can use to address land-use decisions and aquifer withdrawals in context of long-term monitoring of groundwater resources. To be practical for managing sustainable ground-water development, resource assessments need to produce applicable spatial datasets and publically available archives of streamflow, groundwater, and water quality monitoring data to facilitate their present and future use by decision makers.

How the USGS Helps

The USGS has been assessing water availability in Fauquier County and surrounding areas since 1983. At the regional-scale, changes in land-use and major water-budget components can be addressed with the USGS Soil-Water-Balance Model. GIS output of aquifer recharge, for example, can be easily downscaled to facilitate local-scale investigations.

Surface-water and groundwater monitoring networks are being established to address questions regarding water-level declines, contributing areas to wells, interconnection of pumping wells, and interactions with streams in an effort to establish current conditions and facilitate future investigations.

The inventory of aquifer conditions in Fauquier County provided by this study will be important for assessment of source waters to public supplies where regional geologic structure may significantly influence the understanding of areas contributing to localized withdrawals.