Water and gas chemistry data from wells and hot springs in the Western USA, 1930 – 2006

Abstract

Historical water and gas chemistry data from geothermal areas are important for detecting long-term patterns, informing geothermal energy exploration, development, and use, and for contextualizing more recent data. The U.S. Geological survey has published water and gas chemistry data from geothermal areas in the western United States, which is primarily available as scanned PDF files. This makes the data difficult to access or include in large-scale data analysis. This data release provides digitized and reformatted data from 20 previously published U.S. Geological Survey Open-File reports and journal articles, representing 1867 water chemistry samples and 313 gas chemistry samples. All data have been standardized to the same units, geographic coordinates, and file format. Description of sample site location was improved. Many reports do not report geographic location coordinates; those that do are frequently inaccurate, as latitude and longitude were interpolated from a map, or in some cases, estimated in the field before the common use of global positioning systems (GPS). Collection dates for individual samples range from 1930 to 2005, although most samples were collected between the years 1970 and 2000. Samples are primarily from California, Oregon, and Washington, although some reports include data from sites in Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Recommended citation:

Gregoire, R., Peek, S.E., and Hurwitz, S., 2024, Water and gas chemistry data from wells and hot springs in the Western USA, 1930 – 2006: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P96Q13U3.