Data Collection and Formatting

In the absence of any comprehensive government initiative to collect sub-surface data for either the province or the nation as a whole, groundwater modelers have largely relied on the sub-surface data compiled from private drilling companies. Government regulation specifies that quantitative depth and layer thickness data must be provided in addition to summary semantic descriptions of bed layer lithology.

The sub-surface data for the Grand Forks and Abbotsford areas therefore represent a compilation of data from numerous sources, under loosely regulated circumstances and of a highly interpretive nature . Our initial datasets consisted of records of more than 17,000 records of bed layers in Abbotsford, and 1,100 in Grand Forks . Relevant attribute data included: well tag number, layer order (for each site), depth of layer, elevation at top layer, and a summary description. UTM coordinates were not appended and had to be matched to an index with well tag numbers.