Drinking-Water
Drinking-Water
The USGS California Water Science Center works with drinking water facilities and municipal suppliers to monitor and assess the quality of the water used as a source for our state's drinking water needs. Ongoing research is addressing concerns over groundwater supply, water quality of wells, agricultural and industrial by-products in drinking water, toxins from harmful algal blooms, effects from wildfires, floods, and debris flow, and other issues affecting California's drinking water supply.
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Processes Controlling Riverbank Filtration of Pathogens in the Russian River Basin, Sonoma County, California
The Sonoma County Water Agency (SCWA) supplies drinking water to municipalities and water districts in Sonoma and Marin Counties by diverting water from the alluvial aquifer underlying and adjacent to the Russian River. The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with SCWA, is conducting an ongoing research program on water quality conditions in the Russian River and the physical and geochemical...
Continuous Monitoring of Water Quality and Suspended-Sediment Transport in the San Francisco Bay and Delta
Our group at the USGS continuously monitors suspended-sediment concentration (SSC), turbidity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity, and water level at many sites throughout the San Francisco Bay (Bay) and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers Delta (Delta). Our work began in 1988 to explore the spatial and temporal variability of water quality and sediment transport and to provide decision makers...
Mercury
Mercury is a rare, dense metal, slightly more common than gold in the earth's crust. Mercury occurs in several different forms, the most important of which is methylmercury. Methylmercury is the form most readily incorporated into biological tissues and most toxic to humans. Methylmercury accumulates and biomagnifies in the food chain, reaching highest concentrations in predatory fish such as bass...
California Oil, Gas, and Groundwater (COGG) Program
The USGS California Water Science Center is working in partnership with state and federal agencies to answer the following questions about oil and gas development and groundwater resources:
Low Intensity Chemical Dosing (LICD)
Rivers, wetlands, and agricultural operations supply natural organic material to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta) and the San Francisco Estuary. This natural organic matter provides many ecosystem benefits, but it also adversely affects drinking water. During drinking water treatment, chlorine added for purposes of pathogen control reacts with dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in the water to...
California Water Use
The U.S. Geological Survey's National Water-Use Information Program compiles the nation's water-use data at the county, state, and national levels. USGS five-year reports on national and state water-use estimates between 1950-2015 are posted on the web at: http://water.usgs.gov/watuse/. USGS water-use data for states and counties for 1985-2015 are available at: http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/wu.
California Water Use, 2010
In 2010, Californians withdrew an estimated total of 38 billion gallons of water per day, compared with 46 billion gallons per day in 2005.
Iron Mountain: An Extraordinary and Extreme Environment
At its peak production, Iron Mountain ranked as the tenth largest copper production site in the world, sixth in the U.S. and first in California. During its operation, from 1879 - 1963, ten different mines throughout the site's 4,400 acres were the source of not just copper, but also silver, iron, gold, zinc and pyrite (iron sulfide). A century of active mining at Iron Mountain took an...