Groundwater Quality in the Santa Barbara Coastal Plain, California

Groundwater provides more than 40 percent of California’s drinking water. To protect this vital resource, the State of California established the Groundwater Ambient Monitoring and Assessment (GAMA) Program. The Priority Basin Project of the GAMA Program provides a comprehensive assessment of the State’s groundwater quality and increases public access to groundwater-quality information. The Santa Barbara Coastal Plain is one of the study units.

The Santa Barbara study unit covers more than 48 square miles in the Transverse and Selected Peninsular Ranges hydrogeologic province and includes parts of Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties (Davis and Kulongoski, 2016). The study unit is flanked by the Santa Ynez Mountains on the north and the Pacific Ocean on the south. The study unit consists of five coastal plain groundwater basins (California Department of Water Resources, 2003). These five groundwater basins are Goleta, Foothill, Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, and Montecito, from west to east.