Publications

The High Plains aquifer underlies one of the major agricultural areas in the world, including parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. Ground-water irrigation expanded rapidly after 1940 in the area underlain by the High Plains aquifer (called the 'High Plains region' in this report): 1949--2.1 million acres; 1959--6.1 million acres...

A network of 34 stream sampling sites was established in the 1,005-square-mile Cheney Reservoir watershed, south-central Kansas, to evaluate spatial variability in concentrations of selected water-quality constituents during low flow. Land use in the Cheney Reservoir watershed is almost entirely agricultural, consisting of pasture and cropland. Cheney Reservoir provides 40 to 60 percent...

The effects of basin size on low-flow stream chemistry and subsurface contact time were examined for a part of the Neversink River watershed in southern New York State. Acid neutralizing capacity (ANC), the sum of base cation concentrations (SBC), pH and concentrations of total aluminum (Al), dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and silicon (Si) were measured during low stream flow at the...

This study tested the hypothesis that sorption of hydroxylated atrazine degradation products (HADPs: hydroxyatrazine, HA; deethylhydroxyatrazine, DEHA; and deisopropylhydroxyatrazine, DIHA) to soils occurs by mixed-mode binding resulting from two simultaneous mechanisms: (1) cation exchange and (2) hydrophobic interaction. The objective was to use liquid chromatography and soil...

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

The characterization of instream and riparian habitat is part of the multiple lines of evidence used by the U.S. Geological Survey's National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program to assess the water quality of streams. In the NAWQA Program, integrated physical, chemical, and biological assessments are used to describe water-quality conditions. The instream and riparian habitat data...

Three regional aquifers systems are the basis for describing the geohydrology of bedrock aquifers in the central United States. The Great Plains aquifer system, composed of Lower Cretaceous sandstone, generally contains brackish water (1,000 to 10,000 milligrams per liter dissolved solids); the Western Interior Plains aquifer system of lower Paleozoic rocks contains saline water and is...

Large chloride concentrations in Arkansas River water have the potential to degrade water quality in the adjacent Equus beds aquifer between Hutchinson and Wichita, Kansas. The aquifer is an important source of water for municipal, industrial, agricultural, and domestic uses. A three-dimensional, finite-difference, ground-water flow-model program (MODFLOW) was used with data from past...

Historical pesticide data from 1970-90 were compiled for 140 surface-water, 92 ground-water, 55 streambed-sediment, and 120 biological-tissue sampling sites within the Ozark Plateaus National Water-Quality Assessment Program study unit. Surface-water, bed-sediment, and biological-tissue sites have drainage basins predominantly in the Springfield and Salem Plateaus; ground-water sites are

No abstract available.

The occurrence and geographic distribution of major metals and trace elements was assessed in the lower Kansas River Basin of Kansas and Nebraska by studying the concentrations of metals and nonmetallic elements in the less-than 63-micrometer-sized fraction of streambedsediment samples from 422 sites on first- and second-order streams. Median concentrations were the same order of...