Merged digital aeromagnetic data for the middle Rio Grande and southern Espanola basins, New Mexico

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) recently conducted a multi-disciplinary study of the Middle Rio Grande basin (Bartolino and Cole, 2002; Fig. 1). The main purpose of this study was to gain a better multi-dimensional understanding of the basin's hydrogeologic framework and use this new understanding to construct an improved regional ground-water flow model. The Middle Rio Grande basin fill serves as the primary water resource for Albuquerque and surrounding communities (Thorn and others, 1993). It is composed of poorly consolidated, Tertiary to Quaternary sediments, collectively called the Santa Fe Group. These sediments were deposited during the Tertiary to Quaternary development of the Rio Grande rift (Fig. 1, inset). The strata vary in thickness from 1,000 to more than 4,000 m and range from mudstone to conglomerate (Kelley, 1977; May and Russell, 1994).