Water use data for various spatial scales in the United States, 1985-2015

This data release package contains water-use estimates from 1985 to 2015 aggregated to 8-digit Hydrologic Unit (HUC8), county, and aquifer level for the United States. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is responsible for estimating water-use in the United States. In cooperation with local, State, and Federal agencies, the USGS has published estimates of water use in the United States every 5 years, beginning in 1950. This data release contains HUC8 and county-level water-use data that support state and national-level estimates published in Solley and others, 1988, 1993, 1998; Hutson and others, 2004; Kenny and others, 2009; Maupin and others, 2014, and Dieter and others, 2018, as well as several other information products described within the child data releases. This dataset contains data for public supply, domestic, commercial, irrigation, thermoelectric power, industrial, mining, livestock, and aquaculture water-use categories.
This data release also serves as an archive of the USGS Aggregate Water-Use Data System (AWUDS) database which was the information store for the above publications. AWUDS was decommissioned in 2025. Some of the values which were entered and kept in this database were not explicitly published in the past publications, but are included in this data release for archival purposes. Some data in the publications cited here may not come from values marked as published in the AWUDS database. In some such cases, the data may be found in the revised datasets here. In other cases, where the data was not stored in AWUDS at all, please contact the original study authors.