NATIONAL GEOTHERMAL DATA SYSTEM: STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY CONTRIBUTIONS TO DATE

In collaboration with the Association of American State Geologists, the Arizona Geological Survey is leading the effort to bring legacy geothermal data to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Geothermal Data System (NGDS). NGDS is a national, sustainable, distributed, interoperable network of data and service (application) providers entering its final stages of development. Once completed, the geothermal industry, the public, and policy makers will have access to consistent and reliable data, which in turn, reduces the amount of staff time devoted to finding, retrieving, integrating, and verifying information. With easier access to information, the high cost and risk of geothermal power projects, especially exploration drilling, is reduced. This presentation focuses on the scientific and data integration methodology as well as State Geological Survey contributions to date.

The NGDS is built using the U.S. Geoscience Information Network (USGIN) data integration framework to promote interoperability across the Earth sciences community and with other emerging data integration and networking efforts. Data provenance is central to USGIN and focuses on allowing data providers to maintain and house their data rather than submitting it to a central data repository.

After concluding the second year of the project, we have nearly 800 datasets representing over 2 million data points from the state geological surveys. A new AASG specific search catalog based on popular internet search formats enables end users to more easily find and identify geothermal resources in a specific region. Sixteen states, including a consortium of Great Basin states, have initiated new field data collection for submission to the NGDS. The new field data includes data from at least 21 newly drilled thermal gradient holes in previously unexplored areas.

Most of the datasets provided to the NGDS are being portrayed as Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS), meaning that the data is compatible with a variety of visualization software.