Cheryl A Buchwald

Cheryl Buchwald is a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) since 2000. For most of her career, she works on county, regional, and national-scale hydrogeologic investigations providing research, database, and GIS support. In 2003, she became the Water-Use Specialist for Wisconsin, responsible for compiling, analyzing and disseminating the State’s water-use data as part of the National Water Availability and Use Science Program. She has led several water-use components for national studies, including the first National Water Census pilot study of the Great Lakes Basin and the National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program’s regional assessment of public-supply groundwater use within the Glacial Aquifer System. She is an expert for USGS' Site-Specific Water-Use Database (SWUDS) and liaison between national water-use program and local water science center staff.

Her other roles include being a Database Administrator for the WI’s Ground-Water Site-Inventory (GWSI), Aggregated Water-Use Data System (AWUDS), SWUDS, and two Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) Fish Management and Beach Health databases.

Education

B.S. Geology - University of Wisconsin-Madison (2000)

Areas of Expertise

• Water-use science, including developing methods for quantifying water withdrawals to improve our understanding of how water is used in order to meet current and future demands
• Scholarly peer review of water-use subject matters and procedural documents
• Database user acceptance testing for the USGS’s National Water Information System (NWIS) water-use databases
• Proficient in using USGS’s Ground Water Site Inventory (GWSI), Management and Population of Sites (MAPS), Site-specific Water-Use Data System (SWUDS), and Aggregate Water-Use Data System (AWUDS)
• GIS support for regional hydrogeologic investigations, specifically groundwater-flow models
• Data support and training for project data needs assessment and data collection, organization, analysis, management, and dissemination

Current Projects

• Public-supply record and water service area spatial layer development as part of the National Water Census and Water Budget Estimation and Evaluation Project
• Lead Upper Midwest Water Use Research Team investigating unaccounted water use due to state reporting threshold differences, public-supply deliveries to customer classifications, explanatory variables to describe and predict industrial water use, and new approaches to visualize water-use data.
• Every five years, since 2000, determine and report on water use for Wisconsin by county, category, and water source type
• SWUDS Technical Expert and Liaison between State Water-Use Specialists and project management
• Member and trainer for the USGS’s Water Use Operations Support Team (WUOST)
• Provide database and application support for WDNR’s Fish Management Program
• Provide database and application support for Wisconsin’s Beach Health website and internal data management sys