Publications

Tropical cyclones (coastal storm events that include tropical depressions, tropical storms, and hurricanes) cause landscape-scale disturbances that can lead to impaired water quality and thus reduce water availability for use. Stakeholders and scientists at local and national scales have illustrated a need for understanding these risks to water quality. A regional and comprehensive...

As part of a cooperative investigation between the U.S. Geological Survey and the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries, a network of 22 groundwater wells were sampled from 2014 through 2020 for about 230 pesticide and pesticide degradate compounds. Wells were located in three regions of intensive agricultural land use in Alabama: Baldwin County, the Wiregrass region, and the...

Global demand for lithium, the primary component of lithium-ion batteries, greatly exceeds known supplies, and this imbalance is expected to increase as the world transitions away from fossil fuel energy sources. High concentrations of lithium in brines have been observed in the Smackover Formation in southern Arkansas (>400 milligrams per liter). We used published and newly collected...

Groundwater is heavily used for public supply and industrial uses in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, area. Lowered water levels resulting from groundwater withdrawals have induced the movement of saltwater towards wells in East Baton Rouge and West Baton Rouge Parishes. Saltwater intrusion has the potential to affect water supply infrastructure, reduce water availability for some uses, and...

Streamflow records from hydrologic models are attractive for use in operational hydrology, such as a streamflow frequency analysis. The amount of bias inherent to simulated streamflow from hydrologic models is often unknown, but it is likely present in derivative products. Therefore, a workflow may help determine where streamflow frequency analysis is credibly feasible from simulated...

Purpose Cover crops and reduced tillage are two key climate smart agricultural practices that can provide agroecosystem services including improved soil health, increased soil carbon sequestration, and reduced fertilizer needs. Crop residue carbon traits (i.e., lignin, holocellulose, non-structural carbohydrates) and nitrogen concentrations largely mediate decomposition rates and amount...

To improve flood-frequency estimates for rural streams in the Coastal Plain region of Louisiana, generalized least-squares regression techniques were used to relate corresponding annual exceedance probability streamflows for 211 streamgages in the region to a suite of explanatory variables that include physical, climatic, pedologic, and land-use characteristics of the streamgage drainage...

Winter cover crops are planted during the fall to reduce nitrogen losses and soil erosion and improve soil health. Accurate estimations of winter cover crop performance and biophysical traits including biomass and fractional vegetative groundcover support accurate assessment of environmental benefits. We examined the comparability of measurements between ground-based and spaceborne...

Study region

RiverWare is a river system modeling tool developed by CADSWES (Center of Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems) that allows the user to simulate complex reservoir operations and perform period-of-record analyses for different scenarios. For the InFRM hydrology studies, RiverWare is used to generate a homogeneous regulated POR by simulating the basin as if the...

In this research effort we assess the performance of atmospheric correction-based surface reflectance (SR) retrievals from two satellite image sources, one with very high spatial resolution (VHR) (

The Mississippi Alluvial Plain, located in the south-central United States, is undergoing long-term groundwater-level declines within the surficial Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer (hereinafter referred to as “alluvial aquifer”), which has raised concerns about future groundwater availability. In some parts of the alluvial aquifer, groundwater availability for common uses such...