WATER USE

 Water-use home

• Summaries
  • Total water use
  • Groundwater
  • Surface water
  • Historical trends

• Water use by category
  • Public supply
  • Domestic
  • Irrigation
  • Thermoelectric power
  • Industrial
  • Mining
  • Livestock
  • Aquaculture

• Data downloads

• Publications
  • National
  • State
  • Methods

Estimated Use of Water in the United States
County and HUC8 Data for 1990

The current best estimates of county, State, and national water-use data may be downloaded from the National Water Information System Web (NWISWeb) interface, Water Data for the Nation, by selecting the Water Use button or data category pull-down. Data on NWISWeb may have been revised from previous publications such as Circular 1081.

The files linked on this page present water-use estimates by county and hydrologic units (watersheds) for the United States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands which support the State-level water-use estimates published in Circular 1081, Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 1990. Publication data files for other 5-year reports are also available.

The summary of category changes and the water-use terminology page may also be helpful.

Comprehensiveness of data collection for 1990

• All States provided estimates for public supply, domestic, commercial, irrigation, livestock, industrial, mining, and thermoelectric power water use.
• All States provided estimates of public supply deliveries for domestic, commercial, industrial, and thermoelectric power use.
• All States provided estimates of wastewater releases.
• All States provided estimates of hydroelectric power instream use.

Levels of data aggregation and release outlet

• State-level data for 1990 were published in USGS Circular 1081.
     Data file of state-level data (tab-delimited text) Data dictionary
• County-level data for 1990 are in the files linked from this page.
• Water-resources region data for 1990 were published in USGS Circular 1081.
     Datafile of HUC2-level data (tab-delimited text)
• Water-resources subregion (HUC4), accounting unit (HUC6), and cataloging unit (HUC8) for 1990 are in the data files linked from this page.

Data Files

Individual State data files for counties and watersheds are provided in tab-delimited text files (.txt). The watershed file for the United States as a whole is concatenated from the individual State files. Watersheds that cross State lines will have entries for each State section, which must be added together to determine the total water use for the watershed.

A separate data dictionary is available for use with the text files. An index of county FIPS codes is available from the U.S. Census Bureau.