Priority Counties for Rainwater Harvesting on the Ogallala Aquifer, Texas

Data for this spatial analysis were aquired from the Texas General Land Office and the Texas Water Development Board websites. Each of these sites contain comprehensive data related to water conservation in Texas but only the following nine shapefiles were useful for to this particular multi-criteria evaluation. The rationale behind the choice for each shapefile is discussed in the Methodology section.

One crucial piece of data required for this analysis was well density for counties on the Ogallala Aquifer. This data was generated using the Texas Wells shapefile and selecting wells by county name for each of the counties on the aquifer. The number of records per county corresponded to the amount of wells in that county and this data was then added as a new field in the attributes of an Ogallala Counties shapefile (see Methodology for a description of how this file was generated). Well density was calculated in a second new field by dividing the number of wells by county area (sq. mi.). Finally, the data was ranked from lowest density to highest density in a third new field.

Ranked precipitation data was also required. The LEGEND field in the attributes of the Texas Precipition shapefile contained precipitation ranges and these were used to create a ranking from highest precipitation to lowest precipitation in a new field in the attributes of an Ogallala Precipitation shapefile (see Methodology).

Primary Data