What this surface covers
A section with no figure here is not a section without water. It is usually a section the aquifer does not reach.
This surface covers the High Plains aquifer — western and central Kansas. Eastern Kansas is almost entirely absent (69 sections out of 33,190), and that is not a gap in the data: the aquifer does not extend there. A section with no figure here is not a section with no water.
How we know
We joined the survey grid of this layer to the Kansas well completion records that name a township and range, and asked one question: of the sections that have a well in them, how many appear in this water-table layer?
| Part of the state | Present |
|---|---|
| West — range 25W and beyond | 68.3% |
| Centre — ranges 10W to 24W | 63.3% |
| East — ranges east of the meridian | 0.0% |
⚠️ Read as a single number, the join is 33–37%, barely above what fabricated township codes score against the same layer (22–27%). It was the breakdown by region that showed the join is real where the question is asked, and absent where the aquifer is not. A rate read whole would have killed this site for the wrong reason.
What is in the file
| Region | Sections | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Far western Kansas | 20,734 | 62.5% |
| Central and western Kansas | 9,033 | 27.2% |
| Central Kansas | 3,354 | 10.1% |
| Eastern Kansas | 69 | 0.2% |
1,064 townships appear in the layer; 256 of them carry a page here, grouped into 40 counties. The full township list.