Alberta Geological Survey partnered with Alberta Environment (AENV) Northern Region to compile and analyze groundwater data in the Cold Lake-Beaver River Drainage Basin. This compilation and analysis assisted AENV and its stakeholders to complete an update of the Beaver River-Cold Lake Water Management Plan.
This digital file provides the contours of the hydraulic-head distributions for the Grand Centre, Sand River, Ethel Lake and the Muriel Lake formations, and the Empress Formation Units 1 and 3 based on reported static-water levels from water wells within the study area.
Alberta Geological Survey (AGS) first identified all water wells within the study area. It then examined the completion details of the water wells.
Alberta Geological Survey only used wells where:
1. the casing material was listed as being plastic, wood or cribbing;
2. screen or perforated material was plastic or stainless steel;
3. seal material was defined, but where the seal was described as sand pack, gravel pack, sand, gravel, unknown or other the well was culled from the final dataset;
4. the seal bottom interval was within 6.1 m (20 feet) of the top of the screened or perforated interval; and
5. a static-water level was recorded for the well.
Alberta Geological Survey assigned the completion interval of the well to formations by comparing the top and bottom interval of the screened or perforated interval to the top and bottom of the formations defined at that well location. If the screened or perforated interval of the well straddled a formation top or bottom, AGS staff examined the well completion details and the lithology recorded during drilling of the well to determine the appropriate formation assignment for that well. If AGS staff could not determine an appropriate assignment, the well was omitted from the final dataset used to determine the static-water level.
Visual inspection confirms all line work matched up correctly when overlain with the appended original shapefiles. There are no missing or incorrect line attributes.
Alberta Geological Survey compiled all water wells within the study area from Alberta Environment’s water-well database into an MS Access database. Alberta Geological Survey (AGS) staff used various culling criteria with MS Access to select a subset of water wells to use in the gridding and contouring of static water levels. Once the subset was selected, AGS staff used Viewlog software to assign the wells to the formations the screened or perforated interval fell within. Staff then gridded and contoured the static water level data for each formation using Spatial Analyst in ArcGIS 3.
The shapefile was created by combining six individual line shapefiles. For each original shapefile,
1. all columns from the original shapefile were deleted except for ELEVATION in the attribute table;
2. a new column called UNIT was added to store the formation name; and
3. the column heading ELEVATION in the original shapefile was renamed to ELEV_MASL in Excel.
We used the Append tool to append all shapefiles into one.