Idaho irrigation water use
Total fresh (non-saline) groundwater and surface-water withdrawn for irrigation in Idaho, summed across counties, from USGS's 5-year Water Use Circular series.
Publisher
- Organization
- U.S. Geological Survey
- Publisher’s dataset
- Estimated Use of Water in the United States: Irrigation Withdrawals
- File or API used
- https://water.usgs.gov/watuse/data/
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-usgs-water-use.py- Methodology
- https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/accessing-water-use-data
Coverage
- Geography
- Idaho (statewide total, summed from county-level source files)
- Time coverage
- 1985-2010
- Update frequency
- Every 5 years
- Published
- not stated
- Retrieved
- September 8, 2026
- License
- The compiled file on this page is CC BY 4.0. The underlying records: Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Irrigation water withdrawals | Fresh groundwater and surface-water withdrawn for irrigation per year, converted from USGS's published million-gallons-per-day figure. | acre feet |
Caveats
- USGS publishes withdrawals in million gallons per day (Mgal/d), a unit this project's schema does not carry; values here are converted to acre-feet per year using a 365-day year and 325,851.427 gallons per acre-foot (1 Mgal/d = 1,120.14 acre-feet/year).
- USGS titles this series 'Estimated Use of Water'; county figures are compiled estimates, not metered totals, and are combined here by simple addition across Idaho's 44 counties.
- Covers irrigation of crops and, from 2000 on, golf courses, combined into one figure; figures include both groundwater and surface-water sources but exclude saline water and reclaimed wastewater reuse.
- 2015, the most recent circular year, is not included: USGS's 2015 county file is republished only on sciencebase.gov, whose robots.txt states it blocks all automated access by default, so it was not fetched. If USGS mirrors that file onto water.usgs.gov, which does allow automated access, it can be added.
- publisherUpdated is omitted: each of the six years here comes from a separate Water Use Circular published years apart (the 2010 circular, for example, was published in 2014), so the dataset as a whole has no single release date.
Pages built on this dataset
Downloads
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Estimated Use of Water in the United States: Irrigation Withdrawals”, compiled from U.S. Geological Survey, Estimated Use of Water in the United States: Irrigation Withdrawals. Retrieved September 8, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/usgs-water-use/. CC BY 4.0.
Cite U.S. Geological Survey directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .