Water Use

Background: The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) maintains an extensive network of reservoirs and aqueducts for water collection, storage, and transport; it supplies more than one billion gallons of drinking water daily to more than nine million people. The East of Hudson (EOH) network (fig. 1) includes thirteen reservoirs – Amawalk, Bog Brook, Boyd Corners, Cross River,

Background For effective wellhead protection, the area where water carrying potential contaminants can enter the groundwater system and flow to the supply well must first be defined, and then best management practices need to be implemented to minimize the opportunity for contamination to occur in areas defined as sources of water to the well. Determination of the sources of water and contributi

New York Drought Information: definitions, information resources, maps, and tools

On Long Island, land use includes the human activities and management practices for which land is used. Land cover is a mosaic of developed, forest, agriculture, and wetlands areas. Both land use and land cover are usually discussed in similar environments. The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) serves as the definitive LANDSAT-based, 30-meter resolution, land cover database for the Nation. NLCD...

Long Island is surrounded by an almost limitless amount of saltwater in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Long Island Sound, and in the many bays bordering Long Island. Although the salty water is important to the economy of the area and is of significant recreational value, this website is mainly concerned with the fresh water of Long Island, which from many standpoints, is even more important than the...

Precipitation is water released from clouds in the form of rain, freezing rain, sleet, snow, or hail. It is the primary connection in the water cycle that provides for the delivery of atmospheric water to the Earth. Most precipitation falls as rain. Water seeping down from the land surface and reaching the water table adds to the groundwater and is called groundwater recharge. Groundwater is...

Streams either gain water from inflow of groundwater from the underlying aquifer or lose water by outflow to the underlying aquifer. Many streams do both, gaining in some reaches and losing in other reaches. Furthermore, the groundwater flow directions near any given stream can change seasonally as the altitude of the water table changes with respect to the stream-surface altitude or when rapid...

Approximately 30% of the world’s water is stored as groundwater. Groundwater moves very slowly, on the order of feet per day, however it is still part of the hydrologic cycle. Most of the water in the ground comes from precipitation that infiltrates downward from the land surface.

Long Island’s aquifer system consists of a seaward-dipping wedge of mostly unconsolidated stratified sediments comprised of sand, gravel, silt and clay.

The foundation of any groundwater analysis, including those analyses whose objective is to propose and evaluate alternative management strategies, is the availability of high-quality data. Some, such as precipitation data, are generally available and relatively easy to obtain at the time of a hydrologic analysis. Other data and information, such as geologic and hydrogeologic maps, can require...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) offers several types of climate information generated from examination of the data in the archives. These types of information include record temperatures, record precipitation and snowfall, climate extreme statistics, and other derived climate products. A collection of statistical weather and climate...

A collection of studies that focused on the quality of groundwater and surface water, are presented in this section. The reports associated with these areas of water quality concerns are linked as an online source for further reading.