Reports

Wildfire affects hundreds of wildland-urban interface communities each year, and yet most communities lack data reflecting the conditions before an event. This study was conducted before the devastating 2020 East Troublesome Fire1, which spread across 193,812 acres and resulted in two lives lost and 366 homes and 214 other structures burned. The fire’s dramatic run threatened over 7,000...

This remote sensing section is based on Nagler et al. (in preparation for the journal Hydrological Processes) and is a summary of the USGS preliminary findings to date. This report documents the changes in green foliage density (greenness) as measured by satellite vegetation index (VI) data and corresponding evapotranspiration (ET) in the riparian corridor of the Colorado River delta...

The Water Level Management Regional Coordinating Committee tasked an ad hoc group to employ structured decision making (SDM) practices to reach partnership agreement around a set of basic recommendations as to when, where, and why WLM should be used as an ecosystem restoration tool in the UMRS. Between April 2021 and August 2021, the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association (UMRBA; www...

The overall status of groundwater quality in the Great Lakes Basin is assessed as “Good” (Figure 1). For the assessed fraction of the basin (84% of the total area), the groundwater quality is “Good” in 58% of the area, “Fair” in 41% of the area, and “Poor” in 1% of the area, resulting in an overall assessment of “Good”. The portions of the basin that have insufficient data (16% percent...

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...

No abstract available.

Every three years the Great Lakes Executive Committee reports on the status of the Great Lakes' ecosystem based on 9 indicators and several sub-indicators. This sub-indicator technical report supports assessment of the Nutrients and Algae Indicator by evaluating the status of Cladophora and other benthic algae that can grow to nuisance levels. Based on established criteria, the overall...

In light of ongoing and geographically widespread highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreaks in wild birds throughout much of Eurasia during 2020–21, the Interagency Steering Committee for Avian Influenza Surveillance in Wild Migratory Birds disseminated an informational memorandum in January 2021 to highlight the need for enhanced surveillance and heightened awareness in North...

The southern Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado preserve the Oligocene to Pleistocene record of North American continental arc to rift volcanism. The 35–23 million year old (Ma) southern Rocky Mountain volcanic field (SRMVF), spectacularly preserved in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, records the evolution of large andesitic stratovolcanoes to...

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...

Municipal water supply for Albuquerque, New Mexico, is provided, in part, through diversion of surface water from the Rio Grande by way of the San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project diversion structure. Changes in surface-water quality along the Rio Grande and its tributaries upstream from the San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project diversion structure are not well characterized. This study...