Water Use

The USGS New England Water Science Center, in cooperation with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, is collaborating on a project to improve the data management, visualization, and sharing of the state’s water use information. Additionally, two water management tools will be upgraded. The project team will develop an Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs...

The Water Cycle Center is a cooperation between U.S. Geological Survey and academic partners in the Northeast that studies complete water cycles and watersheds, from mountaintops to shorelines, concentrating on freshwater ecosystems. This research advances the understanding of processes that determine water availability and is needed to best address future water resource challenges.

The Providence Water Supply Board (Providence Water) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) are collaborating on a study to predict future water demand in and around the city of Providence.

The Scituate Reservoir system is the largest inland body of water in Rhode Island and the principal drinking-water supply for more than 60 percent of the State’s population. The system includes the Scituate Reservoir and five tributary reservoirs with a maximum storage capacity of 37 billion gallons. The drainage basin that contributes water to the reservoir extends across 93 square miles in...

Monthly water use estimates for New England and the rest of the conterminous U.S. are now available for the three largest categories of use in the United States: public supply, crop irrigation, and thermoelectric power generation.

The USGS, in cooperation with the Town of Barnstable and MassWildlife, is assessing the potential effects of new water-supply withdrawals on groundwater levels in the Hyannis Ponds Wildlife Management Area on Cape Cod. A groundwater-flow model is being used to simulate the effects of several possible withdrawal and wastewater-return flow scenarios developed by the Town of Barnstable and...

The Connecticut streamflow and sustainable water use estimator is a decision-support tool that provides estimates of daily unaltered streamflow, water-use adjusted streamflow (for the portions of the state where water-use data are available), and water availability for ungaged, user-defined sites in Connecticut.

The USGS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are examining the potential effects of droughts on the arsenic hazard in private well water across the Nation.

The record setting floods of 2011 in Lake Champlain Vermont/New York U.S. and the Richelieu River in the province of Quebec Canada prompted the U.S. and Canadian governments to work together to identify how flood forecasting, preparedness and mitigation can be improved in the Lake Champlain-Richelieu River (LCRR) basin.

Study estimates about 2.1 million people using wells high in arsenic: USGS research directly supports federal agencies concerned with public health—specifically, understanding natural hazards in private domestic drinking water and the risk they pose to human health.