From the Department of Water Resources:
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, passed in 2014, requires locally formed groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) to create 20-year plans, called groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs). These plans map out how GSAs will manage their groundwater for long-term sustainability, which can be challenging when there isn’t a clear understanding of the movement, depth, quantity, quality, and interaction of groundwater with surface water in a basin.
To help fill in this missing information, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) works with local water agencies to install groundwater monitoring wells. Unlike water production wells, monitoring wells do not remove groundwater, but instead use one or more small diameter pipes placed anywhere from 50 feet to 2,000 feet deep. The pipes house electronic equipment that continuously measures groundwater level information. Groundwater samples can also be manually collected from these wells to check for water quality.
Read more from DWR News here: Monitoring Wells: DWR Helps Locals by Installing ‘Eyes Underground’
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Check out DWR’s Technical Services, which includes monitoring well installation, geophysical logging, geologic logging, groundwater level monitoring training, borehole video logging, and other field activities – and can even be at no cost to qualifying GSAs. Go to this page and click on the Technical Services tab.