The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act made California’s groundwater sustainability agencies accountable for their basins, and made their member districts the source of the numbers. The annual report a GSA files with the Department of Water Resources each spring is assembled from well-level data that districts hold — usually in three systems that do not agree. This is what the report needs and how to make it a query instead of a project.
What the annual report contains
- Groundwater extraction for the water year (October through September), by water-use sector, with the method of measurement — for a district, metered production well by well.
- Groundwater elevation data from the monitoring network — static water levels at the seasonal high and low, with well construction details that qualify the well for the network.
- Surface water supply used or delivered for groundwater recharge or in lieu of pumping.
- Total water use by sector.
- Change in groundwater storage, which the GSA computes from elevations and extraction.
- Progress on the sustainability plan’s projects and management actions.
The GSA does the basin-scale work. The district’s job is to hand over well-level extraction and elevation data that reconcile with production reports, with metering records and with what the district told the Division of Drinking Water in its electronic annual report (eAR). When those three disagree, the district spends weeks finding out why.
Where the weeks go
- Monthly production totals kept per well in SCADA, per source in the eAR, and per account in billing — three totals that were never designed to match.
- Water level readings on paper sounder logs, in a spreadsheet and in the pump-test reports, with static levels taken at different times of day and after different rest periods.
- Well construction details (perforated intervals, depth, seal) needed to justify a monitoring well, sitting in a driller’s log from 1987 that has to be located and read again every year.
- Wells that changed status — destroyed, standby, rehabilitated — without anyone updating the list the GSA works from.
A record that answers the question
Waterwell IQ™ holds each well’s construction, monthly extraction (from SCADA telemetry or entered production), every water level reading with its context, and every status change on one timeline. The compliance view assembles the water-year extraction and elevation tables per well in the layout the GSA and eAR forms use, flags wells whose totals disagree with the metered record, and exports the tables. The district reviews; it does not reconstruct. The same record produces the eAR source data and the adjudicated-basin watermaster reports where those apply.
For the GSA
A GSA that can see member districts’ well records — with the district’s permission, read-only — stops chasing spreadsheets. It sees the wells behind the numbers: which ones are metered, which have current construction data, which have a water level trend that should be in the plan. The GSA page describes that access.
See the compliance view on one of your own wells before the next reporting season. Request a walkthrough →
Sources
- California Code of Regulations. Title 23, Division 2, Section 356.2 – Annual Reports. current. Convenience mirror; the official codified text is 23 CCR 356.2.
- California Department of Water Resources. SGMA Portal – GSP Annual Report module. current.
Every link above was retrieved and read on 2026-09-09. Paid standards are named by designation so you can check them against your own copy.