U.S. Geological Survey

Organization

U.S. Geological Survey

Dataset

Estimated Use of Water in the United States: Irrigation Withdrawals

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

Original file

https://water.usgs.gov/watuse/data/

Methodology

https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/accessing-water-use-data

License

Public domain. U.S. federal government work.

Our copy

usgs-water-use, built by scripts/fetch-usgs-water-use.py

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.