Publications

Executive Summary Chlorinated solvents, including trichloroethene (TCE) and other chlorinated volatile organic compounds (cVOCs), are widespread contaminants that can be treated by bioremediation approaches that enhance anaerobic reductive dechlorination. Reductive dechlorination can be enhanced either through the addition of an electron donor (biostimulation) or the addition of a known

Due to a lack of management operations data, hydrological models may represent reservoirs as natural lakes, leading to poor discharge predictions in regulated basins. To parse seasonal operational signatures, we compare the dynamics of natural lake and reservoir systems across North America using Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite observations and derived discharge...

Remote sensing enables large-scale, image-based assessments of river dynamics, offering new opportunities for hydrological monitoring. We present a publicly available dataset consisting of 281,024 satellite and aerial images of U.S. rivers, constructed using an Application Programming Interface (API) and the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Hydrography Dataset. The dataset includes...

Critical water supply watersheds in the western United States (WUS) are impacted by wildfires, with potential negative effects on water quality and quantity. Scientific understanding is currently insufficient to deliver estimates of wildfire consequences for water quantity that are regionally accurate. Regional variability in the directionality and magnitude of post-wildfire shifts in...

We provide an overview of an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS)-based software-defined radar (SDRadar) system for high-resolution geophysical observations. The radar transceiver is implemented on a Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) platform, along with an ultra-wideband Vivaldi antenna that has a starting operating frequency of 150 MHz, enabling the system to be used across different...

At many petroleum hydrocarbon spill sites, residual spilled product forms a long-term source of groundwater contamination. The phrase source zone natural depletion is used to refer to the mass loss rates. Overall mass lost under environmental conditions was analyzed using conservative biomarker concentrations for a 1979 oil spill in northern Minnesota, USA. After 40–41 years, an average...

Remote sensing can provide reliable information on river depths and this approach might be particularly valuable in areas that are difficult to survey via conventional field methods. In this study, we assessed the potential to map the bathymetry of an inaccessible proglacial river in Alaska from both aerial orthophotos and a multispectral satellite image. In addition, we evaluated a...

The recent SnowEx campaign and the new NISAR satellite mission are lighting the way to high-resolution snowpack monitoring and improved decisionmaking in critical river basins around the world.

Environmental decision-support tools are increasingly being used to serve both expert and non-expert audiences. Many existing tools are primarily expert-focused, and redesigning them can be challenging because experts and non-experts interact with tools differently, existing users may be resistant to changes, and there is little guidance on how to prioritize redesign efforts and...

Efforts to constrain the negative environmental impacts of excess nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are costly and challenging, due in part to inconsistent reporting of nutrient sources at temporal and spatial scales relevant for local decision making. To meet this challenge, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Nutrient Inventory provides estimates of major agricultural...

No abstract available.

The U.S. Geological Survey is developing nationally consistent water-use modeling approaches to replace previous methods relying on locally specific reported and estimated data. These national assessments require datasets that incorporate water withdrawal variability across the United States and over long periods. However, source data often have unclear definitions, missing or varied...