Publications

The Winnebago Pool is a chain of four shallow lakes (Lake Poygan, Lake Winneconne, Lake Butte des Morts, and Lake Winnebago) that are fed primarily by the Fox and Wolf Rivers, two large agriculturally dominated rivers in Wisconsin, United States. Because the lakes have received extensive phosphorus inputs from their watershed, they have become highly eutrophic with much phosphorus in the...

The U.S. Geological Survey evaluated the transformation of mercury to bioavailable methylmercury in Sinclair Inlet, Kitsap County, Washington, and assessed the effect of the transformation processes on the mercury burden in marine organisms and sediment. In August 2008, samples of sediment, water, and biota from six sites in Sinclair Inlet and three bays representative of Puget Sound...

Little St. Germain Lake is a 978-acre, multibasin lake in Vilas County, Wisconsin. In the interest of improving its water quality, the Little St. Germain Lake Protection and Rehabilitation District initiated a cooperative study with the U.S. Geological Survey to describe the current phosphorus input into and export from Little St. Germain Lake and evaluate how water releases at different...

Digital flood-inundation maps for an 8-mile (mi) reach of the Huron River near Hamburg, Michigan (station number 04172000), from downstream of Rickett Road to Strawberry Lake, were created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with Green Oak and Hamburg Townships, Michigan, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The flood-inundation maps also include a 1.16-mi reach of the...

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Soil-Water-Balance (SWB) code was developed as a tool to estimate distribution and timing of net infiltration out of the root zone by means of an approach that uses readily available data and minimizes user effort required to begin a SWB application. SWB calculates other components of the water balance, including soil moisture, reference and actual...

The UFINCH (Unit Flows In Networks of Channels) computer application can be used to simulate daily and unit flows in networks of streams based on geospatial data in the National Hydrography Dataset NHDPlus (with value added attributes), and U.S. Geoogical Survey daily streamflow data from a downstream (or base) streamgage. Among streamflow augmentation methods, UFINCH has the unique...

An understanding of the spatial and temporal extent of groundwater recharge is critical for many types of hydrologic assessments involving water quality, contaminant transport, ecosystem health, and sustainable use of groundwater. Annual potential groundwater recharge was simulated at a 1-kilometer resolution with the Soil-Water-Balance (SWB) model for the glacial aquifer system east of...

The Mississippi River and other large rivers have the potential to regulate nitrogen export from terrestrial landscapes, and thus mitigate eutrophication in downstream aquatic ecosystems. In large rivers, human-constructed impoundments and connected backwaters may facilitate nitrogen removal; however, the capacity of these features is poorly quantified and incompletely incorporated into...

Groundwater age is an important indicator of groundwater susceptibility to anthropogenic contamination and a key input to statistical models for forecasting water quality. Numerical models can provide estimates of groundwater age, enabling interpretation of measured age tracers. However, to extend to national‐scale groundwater systems where numerical models are not routinely available, a...

The North American Great Lakes are a vital natural resource that provide fish and wildlife habitat, as well as drinking water and waste assimilation services for millions of people. Tributaries to the Great Lakes receive chemical inputs from various point and nonpoint sources, and thus are expected to have complex mixtures of chemicals. However, our understanding of the co‐occurrence of...

The U.S. Geological Survey developed a regional model of Lake Michigan Basin (LMB). This report describes the construction of five MODFLOW inset models extracted from the LMB regional model and their application using the particle-tracking code MODPATH to simulate the groundwater age distribution of discharge to wells pumping from glacial deposits. The five study areas of the inset model

Following dam installations in the remote Rainy Lake Basin during the early 1900s, water-level fluctuations were considered extreme (1914–1949) compared to more natural conditions. In 1949, the International Joint Commission (IJC), which sets rules governing dam operation on waters shared by the United States and Canada, established the first rule curves to regulate water levels on these