Publications

This report presents the results of a study to assess potential water availability from the Charles Mill, Clendening, Piedmont, Pleasant Hill, Senecaville, and Wills Creek Lakes, located within the Muskingum River Watershed, Ohio. The assessment was based on the criterion that water withdrawals should not appreciably affect maintenance of recreation-season pool levels in current use. To...

"Atmospheric environmental releases refer to the emission of stable, long-lived compounds of solely anthropogenic origin into the atmosphere and the use of the compounds to estimate dates of their incorporation into groundwater."

The Office of Water Resources (OWR) in the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA) is charged with the assessment of the State’s water resources. This study developed a watershed model for the major river basins that are within Alabama or that cross Alabama’s borders, which serves as a planning tool for water-resource decisionmakers. The watershed model chosen to...

The occurrence of arsenic in groundwater is a recognized environmental hazard with worldwide importance and much effort has been focused on surveying and predicting where arsenic occurs. Temporal variability is one aspect of this environmental hazard that has until recently received less attention than other aspects. For this study, we analyzed 1245 wells with two samples per well. We...

Digital flood-inundation maps for a 6.3-mile reach of the Mississippi River in Saint Paul, Minnesota, were developed through a multi-agency effort by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and in collaboration with the National Weather Service. The inundation maps, which can be accessed through the U.S. Geological Survey Flood Inundation Mapping...

During October–November 2012, a 96-hour aquifer test was performed at a proposed well field in northern Pickaway County, Ohio, to investigate groundwater with elevated nitrate concentrations. Earlier sampling done by the City of Columbus revealed that some wells had concentrations of nitrate that approached 10 milligrams per liter (mg/L), whereas other wells and the nearby Scioto River...

During middle and late Wisconsin time in the Shingobee River headwaters area, the Laurentide Wadena lobe, Hewitt and Itasca phases, produced terminal and ground moraine along with a variety of associated glacial features. The stratigraphic record is accessible and provides details of depositional mode as well as principal glacial events during the advance and retreat of middle and late...

The U.S. Geological Survey partnered with the Vancouver Lake Watershed Partnership in a 2-year intensive study to quantify the movement of water and nutrients through Vancouver Lake in Vancouver, Washington. This report is intended to assist the Vancouver Lake Watershed Partnership in evaluating potential courses of action to mitigate seasonally driven blooms of harmful cyanobacteria and...

It has been documented in the literature that, in some cases, widely used regression-based models can produce severely biased estimates of long-term mean river fluxes of various constituents. These models, estimated using sample values of concentration, discharge, and date, are used to compute estimated fluxes for a multiyear period at a daily time step. This study compares results of...

Small-scale geochemical gradients are a key feature of aquifer contaminant plumes, highlighting the need for functional and structural profiling of corresponding microbial communities on a similar scale. The purpose of this study was to characterize the microbial functional and structural diversity with depth across representative redox zones of a hydrocarbon plume and an adjacent...

An analysis is presented to determine unsaturated zone hydraulic parameters based on detailed water content profiles, which can be readily acquired during hydrological investigations. Core samples taken through the unsaturated zone allow for the acquisition of gravimetrically determined water content data as a function of elevation at 3 inch intervals. This dense spacing of data provides...

Long-term streamflow information is critical for use in several water-related areas that are important to humans and wildlife, including water management, computation of flood and drought flows for water infrastructure, and analysis of climate-related trends. Specific uses are many and diverse and range from informing water rights across state and international boundaries to designing...