The St. Francois aquifer, the lowermost of three regional aquifers that form part of the Ozark Plateaus aquifer system, is composed of water-bearing sandstone and dolostone of Late Cambrian age. The aquifer was studied as part of the Central Midwest Regional Aquifer-System Analysis (CMRASA, Jorgensen and Signor, 1981), a study of regional aquifer systems in the midcontinent United States that includes parts of 10 States. Because of its significance as a source of freshwater in and adjacent to the Ozark Plateaus province (index map) of Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma, a subregional project was established to investigate the Ozark Plateaus aquifer system in more detail than the regional study could provide.
The geologic and hydrologic relation between the Ozark Plateaus aquifer system and other regional aquifer systems of the Midwest is presented in Jorgensen an others (in press). The relation of the St. Francois aquifer to the Ozark Plateaus aquifer system is explained in Imes [in press (a)]. A companion publication, Imes [in press (b)], contains contour maps of the altitude of the top, thickness, and potentiometric surface of the St. Francois aquifer. This report contains maps that show water type and concentration of dissolved solids, chloride, and sulfate in water from the St. Francois aquifer. Most of the data from which these maps are compiled is stored in the CMRASA hydrochemical data base (R.B. Leonard, U.S. Geological Survey, written commun., 1986). Only water quality analyses that ionically balanced to within 10 percent are included in this report. Because few water wells are completed in the St. Francois aquifer beyond the vicinity of the St. Francois Mountains in southeastern Missouri (index map), water-quality data, with few exceptions, are limited to a relatively small area near the outcrop of the aquifer.