Publications

In response to increasing groundwater demand and declining groundwater levels in the Harney Basin of southeastern Oregon, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Oregon Water Resources Department conducted a cooperative groundwater-availability study during 2016–22. This Fact Sheet summarizes the results of this study. Full details of the study are provided in Gingerich and others (2022a...

Building continental-scale hydrologic models in data-sparse regions requires an understanding of spatial variation in hydrologic processes. Extending these models to ungaged locations requires techniques to group ungaged locations with gaged ones to make process importance and model parameter transfer decisions to ungaged locations. This analysis (1) tested the utility of fundamental...

In streams supporting Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) within the southern Puget Lowland, high water temperatures during late summer are a primary water-quality concern. The metabolic rates of fish and other ectothermic (in other words, cold-blooded) species are regulated by water temperature; salmon and other cold-water fish have specific thermal tolerances outside of which they are...

In 2019, the U.S. Geological Survey conducted a reconnaissance survey of concentrations of 41 trace elements present in bed sediment in the reservoir on the Similkameen River upstream from Enloe Dam, near Oroville, Washington. The Similkameen River drains a watershed containing highly mineralized geologic deposits with current (2019) and historical mining activity. Results of this survey...

Land subsidence is a settling, sinking, or collapse of the land surface. In the southeastern United States, subsidence is frequently observed as sinkhole collapse in karst environments, wetland degradation and loss in coastal and other low-lying areas, and inundation of coastal urban communities. Human activities such as fluid extraction, mining, and overburden alteration can cause or...

This paper proposes a graph-based meta learning approach to separately predict water quantity and quality variables for river segments in stream networks. Given the heterogeneous water dynamic patterns in large-scale basins, we introduce an additional meta-learning condition based on physical characteristics of stream segments, which allows learning different sets of initial parameters...

Floodplains are landscape features that are periodically inundated by water from adjacent rivers (Opperman et al. 2010). Ecologically, functional floodplains are characterized by three primary elements: connectivity, flow regime, and spatial scale. Water quantity flowing over floodplains can vary greatly. Based on a flood’s effects on the floodplain, three flood categories have been...

This report is a collaboration by many state and federal agencies working in the Upper San Francisco Estuary to analyze the potential impacts of climate change to different ecosystems found here. Management stategies for ecological values in the face of climate change require reliable and focused information. In this technical report, our focus is on the Upper San Francisco Estuary (SFE)...

No abstract available.

The locations of many faults in and near the Rialto-Colton groundwater subbasin are not precisely known because the spatial density of existing lithologic and hydrologic data used to infer the locations of faults can be sparse. The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District, analyzed structural control of groundwater flow in and near...

A reported fuel release in November 2021 at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility within the naval reservation at Red Hill led to the shutdown of several production wells in the Hālawa area, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. Red Hill Shaft—one of the high-capacity production wells that shut down—was reactivated on January 29, 2022. Submersible pressure transducers were deployed at 20 wells in the Hālawa...

Groundwater provides nearly 50 percent of the Nation’s drinking water. To help protect this vital resource, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Project assesses groundwater quality in aquifers that are important sources of drinking water (Burow and Belitz, 2014). The stream-valley aquifers constitute one of the important aquifer systems being...