Publications

The U.S. Geological Survey evaluated long-term suspended sediment flux and streamflow datasets for temporal trends (monotonic and step trends) at 10 streamgage sites within the Fountain Creek watershed in central Colorado using the Mann-Kendall test (monotonic trend) and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (step trend). Data were collected in cooperation with Colorado Springs Stormwater...

Supporting the overarching goal to evaluate critical minerals nationwide, the mine waste characterization effort in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Mapping Resources Initiative has created a series of protocols to standardize sampling carried out under this effort by the participating State geological surveys and their cooperators. The protocols are based on published, reviewed...

The Cretaceous Mancos Shale is a geologic source of selenium in the lower Gunnison River Basin. Natural weathering processes and human activity mobilize selenium from the Mancos Shale and derived materials, and surface water, groundwater, and sediment all affect the transport of selenium from source areas to receiving streams and biota. Selenium accumulates through the aquatic food chain...

Study Region

We present methods to reconstruct historical chlorophyll a and surface water temperatures from satellite-based remote sensing products for Blue Mesa Reservoir, Colorado, to support algal bloom monitoring. A machine learning model was trained to construct chlorophyll a concentrations from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and in situ measurements of chlorophyll a concentrations (out of bag...

The frequency and severity of wildfire activity in the western United States emphasises the utility of hydrologic models to predict water-quality response. This study presents a novel application of the Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge and Season (WRTDS) method to assess potential changes in water quality in two watersheds draining the North Fork Big Thompson River and Buckhorn...

The U.S. Geological Survey has ongoing snowpack monitoring initiatives to help improve water availability estimates and predictions of streamflow.

Background Wildfires often occur in mountainous terrain, regions that pose substantial challenges to operational meteorological and hydrologic observing networks. Aims A mobile, post-fire hydrometeorological observatory comprising remote-sensing and in situ instrumentation was developed and deployed in a burnt area to provide unique insights into rainfall-induced post-fire hazards...

Given the highly variable distribution of seasonal snowpacks in complex mountainous environments, the accurate snow modeling of basin-wide snow water equivalent (SWE) requires a spatially distributed approach at a sufficiently fine grid resolution (

Climate change in seasonally snow-covered mountain catchments is reducing water supply and decreasing streamflow predictability. Here, we use tritium age dating to show that contrary to the common assumption that snowmelt quickly contributes to runoff, streamflow during snowmelt in western US catchments is dominated by older groundwater. The average age of streamwater during snowmelt...