Background
The Kaweah Delta Water Conservation District is a 350,000-acre area in Tulare and Kings Counties in the southern San Joachin Valley. The District obtains most of its water from local sources including Terminus Dam and Lake Kaweah and from imported surface water. About 1 million acre-feet of water are consumed in the District every year.

During periods of deficient rainfall, over 500,000 acre-feet of ground water are pumped annually. The District has initiated a two-phase project to study issues of water supply and demand and to develop a ground water management program consistent with its adopted AB3030 basin management plan.

Fugro's Role
For phase 1 of the study, Fugro will evaluate the current condition of water supply and demand and develop a database that can be used in Phase 2. The first phase is an update of a report of the District in 1970. During phase 1, Fugro will evaluate all components of water supply, use, and disposal during a 19-year base period (1981 to 2000) to arrive at an operational yield of the District and its six hydrologic units. Phase 2 will involve numerical modeling of the District to validate the analytical approach taken in Phase 1. Various water supply management options will also be evaluated.

For the first phase of the project, Fugro collected a variety of existing data to begin building the database. The following data is being managed in Fugro's Geographic Information System (GIS):

• Cultural features including hydrologic boundaries, district boundary, county boundary, cities, small water systems, roads,
  
• Hydrologic information such as precipitation, precipitation stations, streams,
  
• Geology, soils, land use, and topography,
  
• Wells log data from District wells, DWR wells, USGS wells, oil and gas wildcat wells, Tulare County wells including lithology and electric logs,
  
• Aerial photographs.

After the data was input into the GIS, it was analyzed using various customized routines developed by Fugro and various standard GIS procedures. The GIS was used to:

• Create cross sections to display well lithology and electric log information in relation to various geologic/hydrologic units,
  
• Produce a variety of maps to show geology, water level contours, cultural features,
  
• Calculate changes in water storage,
  
• Provide parameters for input into the groundwater model.