Reports

A regional low-flow survey of small, perennial streams in western Washington was initiated by the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (NWIFC), NWIFC-member tribes, and Point-No-Point Treaty Council in cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey in 2007 and repeated by the tribes during the low-flow seasons of 2008–09. Low-flow measurements at 63 partial-record and miscellaneous...

The streamflow-gaging network in the Puget Sound basin was analyzed for its capacity to monitor stormwater in small streams. The analysis consisted of an inventory of active and inactive gages and an evaluation of the coverage and resolution of the gaging network with an emphasis on lowland areas. The active gaging network covers much of the Puget Lowland largely by gages located at...

A method for the determination of the widely used herbicide diuron, three degradates of diuron, and six neonicotinoid insecticides in environmental water samples is described. Filtered water samples were extracted by using solid-phase extraction (SPE) with no additional cleanup steps. Quantification of the pesticides from the extracted water samples was done by using liquid...

The Concho River Basin is part of the upper Colorado River Basin in west-central Texas. Monotonic trends in streamflow statistics during various time intervals from 1916-2009 were analyzed to determine whether substantial changes in selected streamflow statistics have occurred within the Concho River Basin. Two types of U.S. Geological Survey streamflow data comprise the foundational...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) periodically assesses petroleum resources of areas within the United States and the world. The purpose of this report is to explain the development of an analytic probabilistic method and spreadsheet software system called Analytic Cell-Based Continuous Energy Spreadsheet System (ACCESS). The ACCESS method is based upon mathematical equations derived...

This report emphasizes geographic information system analysis and the display of data stored in the legacy U.S. Geological Survey National Geochemical Database for use in mineral resource investigations. Geochemical analyses of soils, stream sediments, and rocks that are archived in the National Geochemical Database provide an extensive data source for investigating geochemical anomalies...

Most national parks interact with adjacent lands because their boundaries fail to encompass all regional habitats, species pools, and migration routes. Activities planned for adjacent lands can have adverse effects on park resources and visitor experiences. For example, fragmentation of adjacent habitat into smaller and more isolated remnants may influence the suitability of park habitat...

Apalachicola Bay and St. George Sound contain the largest oyster fishery in Florida, and the growth and distribution of the numerous oyster reefs here are the combined product of modern estuarine conditions and the late Holocene evolution of the bay. A suite of geophysical data and cores were collected during a cooperative study by the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Oceanic and...

GENIE is a model-independent suite of programs that can be used to generally distribute, manage, and execute multiple model runs via the TCP/IP infrastructure. The suite consists of a file distribution interface, a run manage, a run executer, and a routine that can be compiled as part of a program and used to exchange model runs with the run manager. Because communication is via a...

An object-oriented parameter estimation code was developed to incorporate benefits of object-oriented programming techniques for solving large parameter estimation modeling problems. The code is written in C++ and is a formulation and expansion of the algorithms included in PEST, a widely used parameter estimation code written in Fortran. The new code is called PEST++ and is designed to...

Models of environmental systems have become increasingly complex, incorporating increasingly large numbers of parameters in an effort to represent physical processes on a scale approaching that at which they occur in nature. Consequently, the inverse problem of parameter estimation (specifically, model calibration) and subsequent uncertainty analysis have become increasingly computation...

The TSPROC (Time Series PROCessor) computer software uses a simple scripting language to process and analyze time series. It was developed primarily to assist in the calibration of environmental models. The software is designed to perform calculations on time-series data commonly associated with surface-water models, including calculation of flow volumes, transformation by means of basic