Publications

Late during the night of August 9, 2009, two storm systems intersected over western New York and produced torrential rain that caused severe flash flooding during the early morning hours of August 10 in parts of Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, and Erie Counties. Nearly 6 inches of rain fell in 1.5 hours as recorded by a National Weather Service weather observer in Perrysburg, which lies between...

Previous water-quality assessments reported elevated concentrations of nitrate and methane in water from domestic wells screened in shallow zones of the Wasatch Formation, Garfield County, Colorado. In 2009, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, analyzed samples collected from 26 domestic wells for a diverse set of...

This report documents selected age data interpreted from measured concentrations of environmental tracers in groundwater from 1,399 National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program groundwater sites across the United States. The tracers of interest were chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and tritium/helium-3 (3H/3He). Tracer data compiled for this analysis primarily...

No abstract available.

Lake Maumelle is one of two principal drinking-water supplies for the Little Rock and North Little Rock metropolitan areas. Lake Maumelle and the Maumelle River (its primary tributary) are more pristine than most other reservoirs and streams in the region. However, as the Lake Maumelle watershed becomes increasingly more urbanized and timber harvesting becomes more frequent, concerns...

Phosphorus from natural and human sources is likely to be discharged from groundwater to streams in certain geochemical environments. Water-quality data collected from 1991 through 2007 in paired networks of groundwater and streams in different hydrogeologic and land-use settings of the Piedmont, Blue Ridge, and Valley and Ridge Physiographic Provinces in the eastern United States were...

During 2007 and 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy, collected quarterly depth-discrete measurements of fluid pressure and temperature in six boreholes located in the eastern Snake River Plain aquifer of Idaho. Each borehole was instrumented with a multilevel monitoring system consisting of a series of valved measurement ports, packer...

In addition to the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Arctic contains a diverse array of smaller glaciers ranging from small cirque glaciers to large ice caps with areas up to 20 000 km 2 . Together, these glaciers cover an area of more than 400 000 km 2 , over half the global area of mountain glaciers and ice caps. Their total volume is sufficient to raise global sea level by an average of about...

A series of widespread, large, low-pressure systems in southern New England in late February through late March 2010 resulted in record, or near record, rainfall and runoff. The total rainfall in the region during this period ranged from about 17 to 25 inches, which coupled with seasonal low evaporation, resulted in record or near record peak flows at 13 of 37 streamgages in central and...

Increasing salinity loading in the Colorado River has become a major concern for agricultural and municipal water supplies. The Colorado Salinity Control Act was implemented in 1974 to protect and enhance the quality of water in the Colorado River Basin. The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Bureau of Reclamation and the Colorado River Salinity Control Forum, summarized...

Pilot points have been used in geophysics and hydrogeology for at least 30 years as a means to bridge the gap between estimating a parameter value in every cell of a model and subdividing models into a small number of homogeneous zones. Pilot points serve as surrogate parameters at which values are estimated in the inverse-modeling process, and their values are interpolated onto the...

The project was initiated in April 2010, and to date has included four sampling events of surface water (April, May, June/July, and August 2010) and five sampling events of biota (April, May, June/July, August, and September 2010) and three sampling events for surface sediment (May, June/July, and August 2010). This annual report briefly summarizes our progress to date.