WRRC Recognizes National Groundwater Awareness Week
The National Ground Water Association’s (NGWA) annual observance of Groundwater Awareness Week is March 9–15, 2025, and is an occasion in which to remember a major but hidden water resource. One of the events that took place this week in celebration of groundwater was a symposium hosted by the Colorado Water Center at the Colorado State University, which was organized by WRRC alum Jacob Peterson-Perlman. The Past and Future of Groundwater in the West symposium held on Thursday, March 13, focused on groundwater throughout the West. Following a session on Colorado water history, a panel of water experts delivered perspectives from other states that featured WRRC Director Sharon B. Megdal, along with representatives from Kansas, Texas, and California. The panelists answered questions about effective groundwater policies, innovations in management and governance, and water quality control in aquifer storage and recovery.
An upcoming WRRC Water Webinar: Prioritizing Transboundary Aquifers in the Arizona-Sonora Region will also focus on groundwater; on March 28, 2025, Universidad de Sonora Professor Elia Tapia will give a presentation that explores the approach to prioritizing assessment of transboundary aquifers in the Arizona-Sonora border region by leveraging publicly available data. Tapia has contributed significantly to the WRRC’s Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Program (TAAP), which originated from the Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Act signed into law in 2006, is authorized by the US Geological Survey and the Water Resources Research Institutes of participating states (Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona), and is part of a federally authorized effort to develop better understanding of priority aquifers and groundwater resources along the US-Mexico border through research and cross-border collaboration with partners in Mexico. Learn more about cross-border collaborations at the WRRC 2025 Annual Conference: Shared Borders, Shared Waters!
The NGWA and its partners initiated National Groundwater Awareness Week in 1999 to “to highlight the responsible development, management, and use of groundwater” and for communities to highlight local water issues. The WRRC maintains a research program on Groundwater Governance and Management with a web page containing relevant news and information.