Publications

In stream systems, disentangling relationships between biology and flow and subsequent prediction of these relationships to unsampled streams is a common objective of large-scale ecological modeling. Often, streamflow metrics are derived from aggregating continuous streamflow records available at a subset of stream gages into long-term flow regime descriptors. Despite demonstrated value...

The Souris River Basin is an international basin in southeast Saskatchewan, north-central North Dakota, and southwest Manitoba. Sustained exceedances of water-quality objectives for total phosphorus, sodium, sulfate, total dissolved solids, and total iron have been reported since the late 1990s at the two binational sites on the Souris River (Souris River near Sherwood, North Dakota [U.S...

Knowing subsurface drainage (tile-drain) extent is integral to understanding how landscapes respond to precipitation events and subsequent days of drying, as well as how soil characteristics and land management influence stream response. Consequently, a time series of tile-drain extent would inform one aspect of land management that complicates our ability to explain streamflow and water...

Researchers routinely study streamflow data to understand the effects of natural climate variability and anthropogenic climate change, and to develop methods for estimating streamflow at ungaged locations. These studies require streamflow data that are not modified or largely altered by other anthropogenic activities, such as reservoirs or diversions. This report discusses a method for...

Flood-frequency analysis is essential in numerous water-resource management applications, including critical structure design and flood-plain mapping. A basic assumption within Bulletin 17C [1], the standardized guidelines for conducting flood-frequency analysis, is that basins without major hydrologic alterations, such as regulation or urbanization, exhibit stationary statistical...

Unconventional oil and gas development that uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing is rapidly changing the landscape and exponentially increasing oil production within the Williston Basin, especially in North Dakota and eastern Montana. The activities associated with unconventional oil and gas development are complex and wide reaching and include, in part, road and well-pad...

Jewel Cave National Monument is in the western Black Hills of South Dakota and contains an extensive cave network, including various subterranean water bodies (cave lakes) that are believed to represent the regionally important Madison aquifer. Recent investigations have sought to improve understanding of hydrogeologic characteristics of cave lakes in Jewel Cave. The U.S. Geological...

The presence of year-round surface water in streams (i.e., streamflow permanence) is an important factor for identifying aquatic habitat availability, determining the regulatory status of streams, managing land use change, allocating water resources, and designing scientific studies. However, accurate, high resolution, and dynamic prediction of streamflow permanence that accounts for...

While nonstationary flood frequency analysis (NSFFA) methods have proliferated, few studies have rigorously compared them for modeling changes in both the central tendency and variability of annual peak-flow series, also known as the annual maximum series (AMS), in hydrologically diverse areas. Through Monte Carlo experiments, we appraise five methods for updating estimates of 10- and...

Evaluating whether hydrological models are right for the right reasons demands reproducible model benchmarking and diagnostics that evaluate not just statistical predictive model performance but also internal processes. Such model benchmarking and diagnostic efforts will benefit from standardized methods and ready-to-use toolkits. Using the Jupyter platform, this work presents HydroBench...

The Williston Basin has been a leading domestic oil and gas producing region. As energy demands have increased, so has energy development. A group of 13 Federal agencies and Tribal groups formed the Bakken Federal Executive Group to address common challenges associated with energy development, with a focus on understanding the cumulative environmental challenges attributed to oil and gas...

About this volumeThe Williston Basin, which includes parts of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota in the United States, has been a leading domestic oil and gas producing area. To better understand the potential effects of energy development on environmental resources in the Williston Basin, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management, and in support...