Multimedia

Images representing three of the services available to users of the National Water Availability Assessments (NWAA) Data Companion. Services include subset and download tool, data file directory, and web services. 

Map of the Upper Colorado River Basin —referred to as an Integrated Water Science (IWS) basins—are intensively monitored study basins representing a wide range of environmental, hydrologic, and landscape settings and human stressors of water resources to improve our understanding of water availability across the Nation.

Water availability in the Klamath Basin is shaped by three interconnected factors, like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. First, upper basin controls—such as groundwater, snowpack, and runoff—determine how much water is available. Second, biological opinions set flow requirements to protect endangered fish and habitats, including flushing and geomorphic flows.

Not all water withdrawals are returned to the local environment. Some water is lost because it is evaporated, transpired, incorporated into products or crops, or otherwise made unavailable for immediate use.

Managed aquifer-recharge methods and processes. Managed recharge—which uses water of dissimilar geochemistry from groundwater through infiltration into shallow aquifers or injection into deep aquifers—can alter hydrologic and geochemical aquifer conditions such that arsenic and other geogenic contaminants are mobilized from sediment to aqueous phase.

A stacked bar chart showing the sources of Nitrogen across hydrologic regions of CONUS (2010-2020). Colors show the total Nitrogen load contributed from agriculture, atmospheric deposition, natural sources, wastewater, and other human sources.