Publications

J.B. Converse (Converse) Lake is the primary source of drinking water for the city of Mobile, Alabama. Concerns regarding the ability of the reservoir to meet current and future water demands during drought conditions have prompted this study. The 1991 through 2006 water years included a drought that occurred during 2000, and drought conditions currently (2007) are affecting the area. To...

No abstract available

Sustainable soils are a requirement for maintaining human civilizations (Carter and Dale 1974; Lal 1989). However, as the “most complicated biomaterial on the planet” (Young and Crawford 2004), soils represent one of the most difficult systems to understand and model with respect to chemical, physical, and biological coupling over time (Fig. 1). Despite the complexity of these...

No abstract available.

Studying the dynamics and geochemical behavior of dissolved and particulate organic material is difficult because concentration and composition may rapidly change in response to aperiodic as well as periodic physical and biological forcing. Here we describe a method useful for quantifying fluxes and analyzing dissolved organic matter (DOM) dynamics. The method uses coupled optical and...

BBecause vadose zone research relates to diverse disciplines, applications, and modes of research, collaboration across traditional operational and topical divisions is especially likely to yield major advances in understanding. The Unsaturated Zone Interest Group (UZIG) is an informal organization sponsored by the USGS to encourage and support interdisciplinary collaboration in vadose...

The Los Angeles Basin is a densely populated coastal area that significantly depends on groundwater. A part of this groundwater supply is at risk from saltwater intrusion—the impetus for this study. High-resolution seismic-reflection data collected from the Los Angeles–Long Beach Harbor Complex have been combined with borehole geophysical and descriptive geological data from four nearby...

Vernal pools are sensitive environments that provide critical habitat for many species, including amphibians. These small water bodies are not always protected by pesticide label requirements for no-spray buffer zones, and the occurrence of pesticides in them is poorly documented. In this study, we investigated the occurrence of glyphosate, its primary degradation product...

This article applies formal detection and attribution techniques to investigate the nature of observed shifts in the timing of streamflow in the western United States. Previous studies have shown that the snow hydrology of the western United States has changed in the second half of the twentieth century. Such changes manifest themselves in the form of more rain and less snow, in...

The design, construction, and performance analyses of a 6.1ha evapotranspiration (ET) landfill cover at the semiarid U.S. Army Fort Carson site, near Colorado Springs, Colo. are presented. Initial water-balance model simulations, using literature reported soil hydraulic data, aided selection of borrow-source soil type(s) that resulted in predictions of negligible annual drainage (⩽1mm...

The relative influences of hydrologic processes and biogeochemistry on the transport and retention of minor solutes were compared in the riverbed of the lower Merced River (California, USA). The subsurface of this reach receives ground water discharge and surface water infiltration due to an altered hydraulic setting resulting from agricultural irrigation. Filtered ground water samples...

A major focus of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Trout Lake Water, Energy, and Biogeochemical Budgets (WEBB) project is the development of a watershed model to allow predictions of hydrologic response to future conditions including land-use and climate change. The coupled groundwater/surface-water model GSFLOW was chosen for this purpose because it could easily incorporate an existing...