Arizona Groundwater Dashboard

Groundwater is water found in the cracks and small spaces between soil particles and fractured rock beneath the Earth’s surface. An underground layer that is saturated with water is called an aquifer. A groundwater basin is an aquifer or stack of aquifers with defined boundaries along the sides and bottom, making it a distinct underground body of water. Groundwater basins may have water inflows and outflows.

Why does groundwater matter?

In warm, dry Arizona, aquifers take thousands of years to fill. But human technology enables groundwater to be withdrawn far faster than nature replenishes it. Once an aquifer is depleted, that groundwater supply is no longer available, and with the water no longer filling the porous underground spaces, the remaining materials are likely to compress causing the overlying land to sink and rendering the aquifer permanently incapable of storing water, a condition called subsidence.

Because groundwater resources in Arizona are considered non-renewable, reliance on groundwater for populations and economies is potentially problematic.  

Arizona’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act aims to reduce groundwater pumping in designated Active Management Areas (AMAs) and halt the expansion of irrigated agricultural acreage in Irrigation Non-Expansion Areas (INAs). However, outside of AMAs and INAs no regulatory framework exists to ensure the long-term water sustainability of groundwater supplies.

The Arizona Groundwater Dashboard provides insights about groundwater use in each of the state's 51 groundwater basins, including:

• The basin-wide rate of groundwater level change--whether it has increased, decreased, or remained about the same;
• The distribution of water uses by categories--agricultural, municipal, industrial, commercial and others;
• The number of wells installed (drilled or rehabilitated) each year; and
• The annual average depth of new wells.

Explore AZ Groundwater Dashboard

This project is co-sponsored by the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative, a multi-year partnership with the state led by Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory in collaboration with the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.