Publications

In the Water Resource Development Act of 1999, the U.S. Congress authorized the deepening of the Savannah Harbor. Additional studies were then identified by the Georgia Ports Authority and other local and regional stakeholders to determine and fully describe the potential environmental effects of deepening the channel. One need that was identified was the validation of a three...

The U.S. Geological Survey and the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Southeast investigated natural and engineered remediation of chlorinated volatile organic compound groundwater contamination at Solid Waste Management Unit 12 at the Naval Weapons Station Charleston, North Charleston, South Carolina, beginning in 2000. In early 2004, groundwater contaminants began moving around the...

Methods of estimating flood magnitudes for exceedance probabilities of 50, 20, 10, 4, 2, 1, 0.5, and 0.2 percent have been developed for urban streams in Alabama that are not significantly affected by dams, flood detention structures, hurricane storm surge, or substantial tidal fluctuations. Regression relations were developed using generalized least-squares regression techniques to...

Public water-supply systems in Tennessee provide water to for domestic, industrial, and commercial uses, and municipal services. In 2005, more than 569 public water-supply systems distributed about 920 million gallons per day (Mgal/d) of non-purchased surface water and groundwater to a population of nearly 6 million in Tennessee. Surface-water sources provided 64 percent (about 591 Mgal...

Groundwater can play an important role in water‐supply emergency planning. A framework is presented for assessing the hydraulic impacts and associated costs of using groundwater as a backup supply when imported‐water deliveries are disrupted, and for quantifying the emergency benefits of groundwater management strategies that enable better response to such disruptions. Response functions...

Increasing human appropriation of freshwater resources presents a tangible limit to the sustainability of cities, agriculture, and ecosystems in the western United States. Marc Reisner tackles this theme in his 1986 classic Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. Reisner's analysis paints a portrait of region-wide hydrologic dysfunction in the western United States

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Georgia Water Science Center (WSC) maintains a long-term hydrologic monitoring network of more than 317 real-time streamgages, more than 180 groundwater wells of which 31 are real-time, and 10 lake-level monitoring stations. One of the many benefits of data collected from this monitoring network is that analysis of the data provides an overview...

Method-of-characteristics groundwater transport models require that changes in concentrations computed within an Eulerian framework to account for dispersion be transferred to moving particles used to simulate advective transport. A new algorithm was developed to accomplish this transfer between nodal values and advecting particles more precisely and realistically compared to currently...

Although the importance of vascular plant-derived dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in freshwater systems has been studied, the role of leached DOC as precursors of disinfection byproducts (DBPs) during drinking water treatment is not well known. Here we measured the propensity of leachates from four crops and four aquatic macrophytes to form trihalomethanes (THMs)—a regulated class of DBPs...

The hydrogeologic framework of fractured sedimentary bedrock at the former Naval Air Warfare Center (NAWC), Trenton, New Jersey, a trichloroethylene (TCE)-contaminated site in the Newark Basin, is developed using an understanding of the geologic history of the strata, gamma-ray logs, and rock cores. NAWC is the newest field research site established as part of the U.S. Geological Survey...

Solid-phase microextraction (SPME) has shown potential as an in situ passive-sampling technique in aquatic environments. The reliability of this method depends upon accurate determination of the partition coefficient between the fiber coating and water (Kf). For some hydrophobic organic compounds (HOCs), Kf values spanning 4 orders of magnitude have been reported for polydimethylsiloxane...

Contamination of urban lakes and streams by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) has increased in the United States during the past 40 years. We evaluated sources of PAHs in post-1990 sediments in cores from 40 lakes in urban areas across the United States using a contaminant mass-balance receptor model and including as a potential source coal-tar-based (CT) sealcoat, a recently...