Publications

Heavy, persistent rains from late February through March 2010 caused severe flooding that set, or nearly set, peaks of record for streamflows and water levels at many long-term streamgages in Rhode Island. In response to this event, hydraulic models were updated for selected reaches covering about 56 river miles in the Pawtuxet River Basin to simulate water-surface elevations (WSEs) at...

Streamflow and concentrations of sodium and chloride estimated from records of specific conductance were used to calculate loads of sodium and chloride during water year (WY) 2012 (October 1, 2011, through September 30, 2012), for tributaries to the Scituate Reservoir, Rhode Island. Streamflow and water-quality data used in the study were collected by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) or...

Runoff-based indicators of terrestrial water availability are appropriate for humid regions, but have tended to limit our basic hydrologic understanding of drylands – the dry-subhumid, semiarid, and arid regions which presently cover nearly half of the global land surface. In response, we introduce an indicator framework that gives equal weight to humid and dryland regions, accounting...

Hurricane Irene passed directly over the Connecticut River valley in late August, 2011. Intense precipitation and high antecedent soil moisture resulted in record flooding, mass wasting and fluvial erosion, allowing for observations of how these rare but significant extreme events affect a landscape still responding to Pleistocene glaciation and associated sediment emplacement. Clays and...

Identifying hydraulically active fractures in low permeability, crystalline-bedrock aquifers requires a variety of geophysical and hydrogeophysical borehole tools and approaches. One such approach is Single Borehole Dilution Tests (SBDT), which in some low flow cases have been shown to provide greater resolution of borehole flow than other logging procedures, such as vertical...

Long Island Sound (LIS) is a relatively shallow estuary with a mean depth of 20 m (maximum depth 49 m) and a unique hydrology and history of pollutant loading. Those factors have contributed to a wide variety of contamination problems in its muddy sediments, aquatic life and water column. The LIS sediments are contaminated with a host of legacy and more recently released toxic compounds...

In cooperation with FHWA, the U.S. Geological Survey developed the stochastic empirical loading and dilution model (SELDM) to supersede the 1990 FHWA runoff quality model. The SELDM tool is designed to transform disparate and complex scientific data into meaningful information about the adverse risks of runoff on receiving waters, the potential need for mitigation measures, and the...

We modified a passive capillary sampler (PCS) to collect snowmelt water for isotopic analysis. Past applications of PCSs have been to sample soil water, but the novel aspect of this study was the placement of the PCSs at the ground-snowpack interface to collect snowmelt. We deployed arrays of PCSs at 11 sites in ten partner countries on five continents representing a range of climate and...

Soil samples were collected throughout Connecticut (CT) to determine the relationship of soil chemistry with the underlying geology and to better understand background concentrations of major and trace elements in soils. Soil samples were collected (1) from the upper 5 cm of surficial soil at 100 sites, (2) from the A horizon at 86 of these sites, and (3) from the deeper horizon...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, determined annual exceedance probabilities for peak discharges occurring during the 2011 water year (October 1 to September 30) at streamgages in Vermont and selected streamgages in New Hampshire, western Massachusetts, and northeastern New York. This report presents the 2011 water year peak...

Since 1999, the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service have been monitoring land use and nitrogen loading in a 26.3-square-kilometer (10-square-mile) estuarine watershed at Acadia National Park, Mount Desert Island, Maine. The initial study linking land use and nitrogen loads entering the Northeast Creek estuary was completed in 2000, and findings were used to develop...

The total nitrogen load to Long Island Sound from Connecticut and contributing areas to the north was estimated for October 1998 to September 2009. Discrete measurements of total nitrogen concentrations and continuous flow data from 37 water-quality monitoring stations in the Long Island Sound watershed were used to compute total annual nitrogen yields and loads. Total annual computed...