Project Summary:

In 2006, the Vermont Legislature passed Act 144 to address a deficiency of information about groundwater resources in the State. The Act provided direction and funding to the Vermont Geological Survey (VGS) to conduct a statewide groundwater favorability study, including a description of current and future groundwater demand statewide. The assessment of groundwater demand is necessary so that areas of the state having the greatest amount of groundwater usage are known, impacts of projected growth on the resource can be assessed, and statewide and regional planning can utilize this knowledge.

To address the need to quantify groundwater demand in Vermont, the VGS and the USGS are conducting a cooperative study that will develop a comprehensive statewide water-use database, including estimates of groundwater demand. The overall objective of this proposed study is to determine how projected population growth in Vermont between 2005 and 2020 will impact groundwater demand. The study will use data available from State and other Federal agencies, in combination with information from other water demand studies in adjacent New England states. Estimates of both surface- and groundwater demand will be included in the study. To assist the State of Vermont in planning for and prioritizing further groundwater assessments, the study will estimate groundwater demand in the year 2020 based on expected population growth. The basic accounting unit will be the Census Block because population data, used as the basis for estimating withdrawals by households for domestic use, are available at that scale. The Census Block provides definition at a scale connectable to a specific resource and also easily can be aggregated to produce estimates by town, county, or watershed.

Data generated from the study will be housed in a Microsoft Access database with geographic features that are linkable to geographic information system software for flexible displays. A USGS report summarizing the methods and data also will be produced.