Abstract
Despite the presence of millions of domestic wells in the Northeastern U.S., there is little knowledge of the vulnerability of these wells to drought. To overcome a lack of reported data on domestic well failure in the Northeastern U.S., this study evaluated whether data from well completion reports could provide insight into the number of well failures occurring during drought. In particular, the study normalizes annual domestic well completions by the number of housing starts to differentiate wells completed to replace failed wells from wells completed due to new construction (as identified from U.S. Census data at the scale of Metropolitan Statistical Areas). The correspondence of elevated normalized well completions to drought was validated by comparing to U.S. Drought Monitor metrics and the occurrence of low water levels in U.S. Geological Survey groundwater monitoring wells. The analysis was completed for 17 regions in New England and New York since the year 2000, providing 261 region-years of data. Aggregated over all region-years, normalized well completions accurately predicted the presence or absence of drought as determined by the U.S. Drought Monitor 78% of the time, and the method had a Heidke skill score of 0.337. Similar results were obtained when drought was defined by changes in water depth in USGS wells. The method suggests that in the Northeast U.S., a region experiencing drought may see domestic well failures at a rate of one in a thousand wells, as an order of magnitude estimate.
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Data availability
The well completion datasets analyzed in this study are available by state: New York (https://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm? DSID=1203), Vermont (https://anrweb.vt.gov/DEC/WellDrillerReports/Default.aspx), New Hampshire (https://www.des.nh.gov/water/groundwater/water-well-inventory), Massachusetts (https://www.mass.gov/service-details/well-database), and Maine (https://www.maine.gov/dacf/mgs/pubs/digital/well.htm). Building permit survey data used to quantify housing starts is available at: https://www.census.gov/construction/bps/msaannual.html.
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Funding
This publication was prepared in part for the NYS Water Resources Institute at Cornell University and the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation Great Lakes Basin Program with support from the NYS Environmental Protection Fund. Funding support was also provided by NOAA Climate Program Office National Integrated Drought Information System.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and analysis were performed by Brigid Mulroe. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Stephen Shaw and Brigid Mulroe, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Mulroe, B., Shaw, S.B. & Kroll, C.N. Using records of well completions to assess vulnerability of domestic wells in the Northeast U.S. to drought. Climatic Change 176, 95 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03570-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03570-9