Summary

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).