Water Supply

The mission of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is to assess the quantity and quality of the earth resources of the Nation and to provide information that will assist resource managers and policymakers at Federal, State, and local levels in making sound decisions. Assessment of water-quality conditions and trends is an important part of this overall mission.

NAWQA is a program from the USGS that addresses the goals of that status of surface-water and groundwater, provide understanding of human impact, and to support local, state, and federal agencies with aforementioned data.

The pace of development in Hopewell Township increased substantially in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Concurrent with this has been an increased awareness of the township’s finite water resources and the potential for environmental degradation from increased ground-water withdrawals and reduced ground-water recharge. The goal of this project is to provide a long-term, easily accessed data base...

Demands on ground water resources in New Jersey require the availability of high quality water for multiple uses. Water resources planning must address these and other needs to insure a water supply of sufficient quality capable of meeting present and future needs throughout the State. The development and implementation of a study on PPCPs and OWCs released to shallow ground water from large scale...

Ground water is an important source of water supply and has a critical role in maintaining the health of aquatic freshwater and estuarine ecosystems in the Delaware Bay and Atlantic Coastal drainage basins of southeast New Jersey, including the Lower Maurice River and Cohansey Rive. In the coming years, the need for water supply is expected to grow and the priority of maintaining dependent...

Development of water supply is a dynamic condition, and demand areas may shift, or quality or quantity concerns may change in a former study area. This program will address the need of the N.J. Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) to understand the possible effects of proposed or planned withdrawals within these previously studied areas. The general objective of this program is to...

The frequent occurrence of OWCs in streams, many of which are used as sources for drinking-water supplies, gives rise to concern over the potential for these compounds to occur in drinking water and, thus, the potential for adverse human- health effects due to chronic exposure to these compounds. Limited sampling conducted by the USGS indicate that some OWCs that occur in source streams are...

Atlantic City Naval Air Station (Atlantic City NAS) located in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey covers an area of approximately 5,000 acres approximately 10 miles northwest of Atlantic City, in Atlantic County, New Jersey. The focus of this USACE investigation is the potential identification of mercury source areas and the migration of mercury within Area U (Absecon Creek Watershed), which...

The Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer system underlies Winslow Township. Under natural conditions, water from the Kirkwood-Cohansey discharges to the perennial streams of the Great Egg Harbor River basin. This is referred to as the baseflow of the stream. Withdrawals by wells from the Kirkwood-Cohansey intercept ground water that would have discharged to a stream. In addition, if withdrawals are of...

The US EPA Office of Research and Development is carrying out a comprehensive evaluation of the potential impacts on water quality and water supply resulting from the increased use of biofuels. Contamination resulting from releases of biofuel from underground storage tanks may impact ground water that is available for municipal water supply. This concern is greatest for regions of the country that...

Since 1922, there have been significant human related changes in the Passaic and Hackensack River Basins including significant hydrologic modifications as a result of water supply development and land use changes that impact the runoff characteristics of these watersheds. Since the goal of the NJDEP modeling effort is to determine the safe yield of the major water supply systems under present day...

In the New Jersey Coastal Plain, where confined aquifers provide over 200 million gallons per day, effective water resource planning and management under increasingly complex circumstances requires a current and improving understanding of the limitations of the available water from confined aquifers, the interconnections between confined and unconfined aquifers, and the sources of flow to critical...