DGS has maintained a network of wells that are used for groundwater level and quality observations since the 1960s. Consultants, government agencies, researchers, and well drillers use these data to evaluate groundwater availability, chemical characteristics, contamination, and other issues.

DGS staff members June Hazewski, Steve McCreary, Rachel McQuiggan, Scott Andres, Changming He, and Tom McKenna regularly monitor more than 100 wells in 13 different aquifers used for water supply. Most of these wells are equipped with automated pressure and temperature sensors that record data every 15 minutes. A small number of wells are equipped with automated conductivity sensors to help track if saltwater problems are developing. Monitoring methods are adapted from protocols from the US Geological Survey, US Environmental Protection Agency, programs in other states, and our own experience.

As of July 2021, our data resource holds nearly 495,000 records of manually measured water levels and daily average water levels derived from almost 4800 wells. Self-service access to these data and statistical products is available from https://www.dgs.udel.edu/water-resources. In addition, DGS works cooperatively with the Delaware Solid Waste Authority and Delaware Environmental Observing System to provide telemetered real-time data from four wells. We also provide groundwater level and quality data from more than 50 Delaware wells to the National Ground Water Monitoring Network (www.cida.usgs.gov/ngwmn) a network of over 30 state and regionally operated groundwater monitoring programs.

We currently manage nearly 30 million water level records collected by automated pressure sensors and are adding over 1.5 million new records to this dataset every year. More than 8.9 million groundwater temperature and 4.9 million salinity records measured by automated sensors are in our water quality dataset. DGS has been increasing our efforts with collection and laboratory testing of water samples and we now hold results of 5464 samples from 641 wells. Many of the lab test data are part of specific publications and are available from the data tab of the DGS web site (https://www.dgs.udel.edu/data). If you cannot find data there then please contact the DGS offices.