Publications

Montgomery County is in the northern part of the Houston, Texas, metropolitan area, the fourth most populous metropolitan area in the United States. As populations have increased since the 1980s, groundwater has become an important resource for public-water supply and industry in the rapidly growing area of Montgomery County. Groundwater availability from the Gulf Coast aquifer system is...

Travel-time capture zones and drawdown for two production well fields, used for drinking-water supply in Miami-Dade County, southeastern Florida, were delineated by the U.S Geological Survey using an unconstrained Monte Carlo analysis. The well fields, designed to supply a combined total of approximately 250 million gallons of water per day, pump from the highly transmissive Biscayne...

In 2010 and 2011, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Northeast Texas Municipal Water District and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, did a baseline assessment of physical characteristics and aquatic biota (fish and mussels) collected at the mesohabitat scale for reaches of Big Cypress, Black Cypress, and Little Cypress Bayous in the Big Cypress Basin...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District; City of Corpus Christi; Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority; San Antonio River Authority; and San Antonio Water System, developed, calibrated, and tested a Hydrological Simulation Program-FORTRAN (HSPF) watershed model to simulate streamflow and suspended-sediment concentrations and...

The study area comprising Harris County and parts of Galveston, Fort Bend, Montgomery, and Brazoria Counties in southeastern Texas forms part of one of the largest areas of land-surface-elevation change in the United States. Land-surface-elevation change in the study area primarily is caused by the withdrawal of groundwater. Groundwater withdrawn from the Chicot and Evangeline aquifers...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Trinity Glen Rose Groundwater Conservation District, the Edwards Aquifer Authority, and the San Antonio River Authority, developed a geodatabase of springs within and surrounding the Trinity aquifer outcrops in a 331-square-mile study area in northern Bexar County, Texas. The data used to develop the geodatabase were compiled from...

Coal-tar-based sealcoat—a product marketed to protect and beautify asphalt pavement—is a potent source of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) to air, soils, streams and lakes, and homes. Does its use present a risk to human health? Results from a new study by researchers from Baylor University and the USGS indicate that living adjacent to a coal-tar-sealed pavement is associated with

From 1999 to 2007, the Indian Health Service reported that gross alpha-particle activities and concentrations of uranium exceeded the Maximum Contaminant Levels for public drinking-water supplies in water samples from six private wells and two test wells in a rural residential neighborhood in the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma Jurisdictional Area, in central Oklahoma. Residents in this rural...

A database containing more than 17,700 discharge values and ancillary hydraulic properties was assembled from summaries of discharge measurement records for 424 U.S. Geological Survey streamflow-gauging stations (stream gauges) in Texas. Each discharge exceeds the 90th-percentile daily mean streamflow as determined by period-of-record, stream-gauge-specific, flow-duration curves. Each...

Zebra mussels were first observed in Texas in 2009 in a reservoir (Lake Texoma) on the Texas-Oklahoma border. In 2012, an established population was found in a near-by reservoir, Ray Roberts Lake, and in June 2013, settled mussels were detected in a third north Texas reservoir, Lake Lewisville. An established population was detected in Belton Lake in September 2013. With the exception of...

The objectives of this project were (1) To determine and present from existing data in Texas, relations between observed stream flow, topographic slope, mean section velocity, and other hydraulic factors, to produce charts such as Figure 1 and to produce empirical distributions of the various flow parameters to provide a methodology to "check if model results are way off!"; (2) To...

The freshwater zone of the San Antonio segment of the Edwards aquifer is used by residents of San Antonio and numerous other rapidly growing communities in south-central Texas as their primary water supply source. This freshwater zone is bounded to the south and southeast by a saline-water zone with an intermediate zone transitioning from freshwater to saline water, the transition zone...