About this site

An independent copy of a public surface, joined to a public well register. Not the register, and not the Survey.

What it is

ks-water-table answers one question: how far has the water table moved under this square mile, and from what? It holds 33,190 sections of the Kansas survey grid, each with the depth to water before the aquifer was developed and the depth in 2022–2024.

This is an independent copy, not the register. The Survey recommends that its data be taken directly from a KGS server rather than through another site that may have changed it — for anything a transaction depends on, use theirs.

Where the figures come from

The water-table surface is published by the Kansas Geological Survey. The wells are the WWC-5 well completion records Kansas has required since 1975 — 77,783 of them fall inside the townships shown here, filed by 1,351 named drilling firms.

The wells below are those the driller filed a WWC-5 completion record for. Kansas has required that filing since 1975, so a township drilled before then shows fewer wells than were sunk — the gap is the paperwork, not the ground.

⚠️ What is inferred, and not given

The county. The water-table layer carries no county name at all — only township, range and section. Every county name on this site is the majority county of the wells filed in the same township-range. Across 42 counties, 99.3% of townships have a majority of at least 90%, and 66.7% of all sections could be attributed at all. It is a good inference and it remains an inference: a township can straddle two counties, and where it does we show the county most filings name, with the percentage beside it.

The region. West, centre and east are our own grouping of range numbers, not a Survey classification.

Everything else — the two depths, the change between them, the well counts, the driller names, the years and the depths drilled — is copied from the source and not adjusted.

⚠️ What we got wrong, and corrected before publishing

The first version of this mesh gave a page to every township with twelve measured sections: 782 pages. Measured before publishing, those pages carried almost nothing of their own. A table of depths is a table of numbers between 0 and 300, and numbers in a bounded range are shared vocabulary, not distinctive content — 67 distinct tokens per table, none unique to a page. The mesh was rebuilt around the drillers, who have names, and cut to 256 pages. The townships that lost a page did not lose their data: they are in the search box, listed on their county page, and counted in their region.

659 sections read exactly 0.0 ft before development and 1,309 read exactly 0.0 ft today — against five occurrences for the next most common value, and not one negative figure anywhere in the file. A continuous surface does not land on the same number 659 times by chance: it is floored at ground level and cannot express a water table standing above the ground. Where either figure is 0.0, the change shown is a floor, not an exact amount, and this site marks it « at least ».