Discharge areas for the transient ground-water flow model, Death Valley regional ground-water flow system, Nevada and California

This digital data set represents discharge areas in the Death Valley regional ground-water flow system (DVRFS) transient model. Natural ground-water discharge occurs by way of evapotranspiration (ET) and spring flow in the DVRFS model domain, an approximately 45,000 square-kilometer region of southern Nevada and California. Ground water is simulated as discharging from a drain boundary (cell) when the simulated head in the cell rises above a specified drain altitude using the Drain package (Harbaugh and others, 2000). Average annual values of ET and spring discharge (San Juan and others, 2004) were used as observation information during calibration of the DVRFS model (Faunt and others, 2004). The DVRFS transient ground-water flow model is one of the most recent in a number of regional-scale models developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to support investigations at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) and at Yucca Mountain, Nevada (see "Larger Work Citation", Chapter A, page 8).