Welcome to Seattle

   The flow of groundwater is crucial for a variety of factors throughout Seattle’s modern infrastructure. Groundwater use in the city has increased drastically over time with the increase in a variety of factors related to the growth of urban centers such as population growth, economic development, and dietary changes (Bierkens and Wada, 2019). These water sources come from all over the city, allowing for businesses and families to get water they need in order to function smoothly in today’s society. Thus, understanding the uses of each groundwater source and how much the water is used by larger groups is crucial to understand the best tactics to sustainably utilize these resources and moderate how much water is taken from these sources. Using the usage of the groundwater from various reservoirs across the city, provided by the King County open data initiative, the source and reservoir are recorded and kept track of for the process of adding the connections to the Sankey. This figure also keeps track of the watershed resource value the water is coming from in order to better understand the amount each source is used. The Sankey above shows the amount of water which is the amount of times a source is used by a specific location, providing an idea on how much a source is being used throughout the city of Seattle by various corporations. More specifically, this is the data which is provided to the King County GIS Open Data and is recorded by the Department of Health. This result provides an idea to which areas might be the best to monitor and keep track of the water levels in this area to see what kinds of points could be critical if the water were to run low in some of these areas. In addition, this is a great way to be able to cross reference and be able to inform these groups if these sources were ever to get contaminated in a significant manner that would be dangerous to the users of this water. All in all, keeping track of the water intake of the various institutions should keep the water use in Seattle safe and sustainable.

References

Data Source:

Groundwater Sources / Gwsource Point. https://gis-kingcounty.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/kingcounty::groundwater-sources-gwsource-point/about. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Bibliography:

Bierkens, Marc F. P., and Yoshihide Wada. “Non-Renewable Groundwater Use and Groundwater Depletion: A Review.” Environmental Research Letters, vol. 14, no. 6, June 2019, p. 063002. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab1a5f.

Note Book:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/13F1Dvu0Sv6vwZ-XTAsbCIHikJgdLbpGj?usp=sharing