Welcome from the Director
As Director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), New England Water Science Center (WSC), I welcome you to our website. I am committed, along with the rest of the New England WSC staff, to serve New England and the Nation by providing the hydrologic information needed for optimum water-resources understanding and management.
The USGS was established by Congress in 1879 to provide the Nation with reliable scientific information to describe and understand the Earth; minimize loss of life and property from natural disasters; manage water, biological, energy, and mineral resources; and enhance and protect our quality of life. The USGS is a scientific organization unique among Government organizations because we have neither regulatory nor developmental authority; our sole product is impartial, credible, relevant, and timely scientific information, equally accessible and available to all interested parties.
The vision of the New England WSC is to lead in public service by providing relevant, accessible, and innovative water science to New England and the Nation. We hope to accomplish this vision by addressing water issues in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont and the larger Northeast Region. These issues include water security (the availability of water resources of usable quality and the array of factors that can affect the availability of those resources) and public safety (flooding, drought, etc...), as well as climate change, which affects both water security and public safety. We provide information about the occurrence, distribution, quantity, movement, and chemical and biological quality of New England’s surface water, groundwater, bays, and estuaries. Areas of focus for monitoring and studies are organized into the Hydrologic Monitoring, Applied Hydrology, and Hydrologic Interpretative Programs, and include, but are not limited to; streamgaging, groundwater levels, surface-water hydraulics and flood inundation, surface-water quality, groundwater contamination, watershed dynamics, urban hydrology, integrated computational modeling, statistical hydrology, geospatial analysis, and coastal studies. The New England WSC primarily carries out its activities from five offices in East Hartford, CT, Augusta, ME, Northborough, MA, Pembroke, NH, and Montpellier, VT, with a highly trained staff of scientists, technicians, and operational personnel committed to providing accurate and timely natural-resource information.
I am very happy you chose to visit our site and I hope that you find the information to be interesting, informative, and helpful. Feel free to contact me to let me know how I can make this service and New England WSC science useful to you.
Thank you for your interest in the USGS New England WSC.
John Bumgarner