Water Quality Monitoring

The New Hope arm of Jordan Lake, located in Chatham County, North Carolina, serves as a drinking-water supply for the Towns of Cary, Apex, and Morrisville. The reservoir is listed as impaired due to nutrient over-enrichment and occasionally experiences algal blooms and fish kills. In order to evaluate effects of installing a vertical-mixing system on the New Hope arm of Jordan Lake, the U.S...

The contaminants of emerging concern (CEC) umbrella covers several broad classes of contaminants that include: pharmaceuticals and personal care products, organic wastewater compounds, antimicrobials, antibiotics, animal and human hormones, as well as domestic and industrial detergents. The potential impacts of CECs on the environment, in general, and on natural surface-water and riparian...

The North Carolina Department of Transportation is planning to make transportation improvements in the Currituck Sound area by constructing a three-lane bridge from U.S. Highway 158 just south of Coinjock, North Carolina, to State Highway 12 on the Outer Banks just south of Corolla, North Carolina. From Aug 2011 to early 2018, the USGS will be collecting regular water-quality samples as well as...

Falls Lake and Jordan Lake are included in the North Carolina Division of Water Quality's 303(d) list of "impaired" waters due to violations of the State chlorophyll-a standard caused by excessive nutrient inputs. Scientific data are needed allocate resources to achieve nutrient reduction targets have been adopted for the Falls Lake and Jordan Lake watersheds for stormwater, as well as for...

Data collected between 1997 and 2008 at 48 stream sites were used to characterize relations between watershed settings and stream nutrient yields throughout central and eastern North Carolina. The focus of the investigation was to identify environmental variables in watersheds that influence nutrient export for supporting the development and prioritization of management strategies for restoring...

Fort Gordon is a U.S. Department of the Army facility located in east-central Georgia, approximately 10 miles west of Augusta, Georgia). The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) South Atlantic Water Science Center is working cooperatively with the U.S. Department of the Army Environmental and Natural Resources Management Office of the U.S. Army Signal Center and Fort Gordon to assess the quality of...

The U.S. Geological Survey South Atlantic Water Science Center, South Carolina office, in cooperation with Charleston Water System (CWS), is evaluating the hydrodynamics of the Bushy Park Reservoir to determine the effects on water-quality conditions.

The Albemarle Sound region was selected in 2012 as one of two demonstration sites in the Nation to test and improve the design of the National Water Quality Monitoring Council’s National Monitoring Network (NMN) for U.S. Coastal Waters and Tributaries. The goal of the NMN for U.S. Coastal Waters and Tributaries is to provide information about the health of our oceans, coastal ecosystems, and...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey to establish two automated water quality monitoring stations and one precipitation monitoring station at Lake Mattamuskeet. Lake Mattamuskeet comprises 41,084 acres of the 50,180 acre Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) and is divided by a causeway. The causeway effectively splits the lake into two...