Datasets used in constructing hydrologic budgets for six bedrock aquifers in the Black Hills area of South Dakota and Wyoming, 1931–2022

Population growth and recurring droughts in the Black Hills region of western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming raised concerns regarding water resources and its future availability. Drought conditions in the late 1980s and the early 2000s stressed local water systems relying heavily on surface water as the population of the region was increasing. In response to water-availability concerns in the late 1980s, the Black Hills Hydrology Study (BHHS) was initiated in the early 1990s to inventory and assess the region's water resources, focusing on the quantity, quality, and distribution of both surface water and groundwater. The population of the Black Hills region increased by about 39 percent since completion of the BHHS in 2000 compared to 2022, which has renewed concerns regarding future water demand and availability in the Black Hills. To address concerns regarding water use and its availability in the Black Hills region, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with West Dakota Regional Water System, completed a study to update hydrologic budgets from the BHHS for six of the most used aquifers in the Black Hills and to evaluate water availability by comparing results from hydrologic budgets to modern well withdrawals and water rights information. Key updates to the BHHS budgets included adding available data from 1999 to 2022 and dividing hydrologic budgets for each aquifer into nine subareas. The aquifers included in this study were the Deadwood, Madison, Minnelusa, Minnekahta, Sundance, and Inyan Kara. Hydrologic budgets consisted of various budgets components including inflows (recharge from precipitation and streamflow losses) and outflows (springflow and well withdrawals). This dataset contains geospatial data (ESRI grids and shapefiles) for study area boundaries, subarea boundaries, potentiometric contours of the Madison and Minnelusa aquifers modified from a previous study, drainage basins used in estimating streamflow recharge, outcrop areas for bedrock aquifers used in estimating precipitation recharge and springflow discharge, and precipitation grids for 1931 to 2022 derived from climate stations. This dataset also includes data tables of precipitation recharge, streamflow recharge, springflow discharge, and well withdrawals in either in comma separated value (CSV) or Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) format.

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  "010:12"
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  "geospatial"
]