Publications

Urbanization has been shown to locally increase the nighttime temperatures creating urban heat islands, which partly arise due to evapotranspiration (ET) reduction. It is unclear how the direction and magnitude of the change in local ET due to urbanization varies globally across different climatic regimes. This knowledge gap is critical, both for the key role of ET in the energy and...

We present a field study combining measurements of vegetation density, vegetative drag, and reduction of suspended-sediment concentration (SSC) within patches of the invasive submerged aquatic plant Egeria densa. Our study was motivated by concern that sediment trapping by E. densa, which has proliferated in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, is impacting marsh accretion and reducing...

Bedload and ancillary data were collected to calculate and compare the bedload trapping efficiencies of four types of pressure-difference bedload samplers as part of episodic, sediment-recirculating flume experiments at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in January–March 2006. The bedload-sampler experiments, which were conceived, organized, and led...

During the time period 2001–2006, the U.S. Geological Survey reported mercury-concentration measurements that exceeded the North Carolina water-quality criterion (NCWQC) of 0.012 microgram per liter for total recoverable mercury in streams and reservoirs across the Triangle Area of North Carolina. Mercury data were sparse, however, generally consisting of only one or two water samples...

Aquatic connectivity projects, such as removing dams and modifying culverts, have substantial benefits. The restoration of natural flow conditions improves water quality, sediment transport, aquatic and riparian habitat, and fish passage. These projects can also decrease hazards faced by communities by lowering water-surface elevations of flood waters and by removing the risk of dam...

Exchanges of groundwater and surface-water are fundamental to a wide range of water-supply and water-quality management issues but challenging to map beyond the reach scale. Waterborne gradient self-potential (SP) measurements are directly sensitive to water flow through riverbed sediments and can be used to infer exchange locations, direction (gain versus loss), scale, and relative...

Worldwide, billions of people rely on fresh groundwater reserves for their domestic, agricultural and industrial water use. Extreme droughts and excessive groundwater pumping put pressure on water authorities in maintaining sustainable water usage. High-resolution integrated models are valuable assets in supporting them. The Netherlands Hydrological Instrument (NHI) provides the Dutch...

Natural perchlorate (ClO4−) exists in many places on Earth, in lunar regolith, meteorites, and on the surface of Mars. Terrestrial natural ClO4− has widely variable Cl and O stable isotopic compositions (δ37Cl, δ18O, Δ17O). The δ18O and Δ17O values of ClO4− from the most hyper-arid locations co-vary. ClO4− from less arid areas has relatively little 17O excess and poor Δ17O-δ18O...

Tracing produced water origins from wells hydraulically fractured with freshwater-based fluids is sometimes predicated on assumptions that (1) each geological formation contains compositionally unique brine and (2) produced water from recently hydraulically fractured wells resembles fresher meteoric water more so than produced water from older wells. These assumptions are not valid in...

Most environmental data come from a minority of well-monitored sites. An ongoing challenge in the environmental sciences is transferring knowledge from monitored sites to unmonitored sites. Here, we demonstrate a novel transfer-learning framework that accurately predicts depth-specific temperature in unmonitored lakes (targets) by borrowing models from well-monitored lakes (sources)...

The Collaborative Science and Adaptive Management Program (CSAMP) has endorsed a goal of reversing the recent downward trajectory of the Delta Smelt population within 5-10 generations, with the long-term aim of establishing a self-sustaining population. An ambitious agenda of management actions is planned, and more management actions are being considered. This White Paper furthers one of...

In this paper, we present an analysis using unsupervised machine learning (ML) to identify the key geologic factors that contribute to the geothermal production in Brady geothermal field. Brady is a hydrothermal system in northwestern Nevada that supports both electricity production and direct use of hydrothermal fluids. Transmissive fluid-flow pathways are relatively rare in the...