Publications

Understanding the drivers and timescales over which groundwater quality changes informs groundwater management, use, and protection. To better understand timescales of water-quality change over short (daily to monthly) and long (seasonal to decadal) timescales, the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Enhanced Trends Network (ETN) program instrumented and sampled thre

Southeastern Utah has a long history of oil and gas production. Two new hydrocarbon extraction wells have been proposed several miles northeast of the town of Bluff, Utah. In response to concern about the impacts of oil and gas extraction in the area on drinking-water quality, this study provides groundwater quality and hydrologic baseline data obtained before drilling the new hydrocarbon extracti

Infections from antibiotic resistant microorganisms are considered to be one of the greatest global public health challenges that result in huge annual economic losses. While genes that impart resistance to antibiotics (AbR) existed long before the discovery and use of antibiotics, anthropogenic uses of antibiotics in agriculture, domesticated animals, and humans are known to influence the prevale

Salinity loading in the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB) costs local economies upwards of $300 million US dollars annually. Salinity source models have generally included coarse spatial data to represent non‐agriculture sources. We developed new predictive soil property and cover maps at 30 m resolution to improve source representation in salinity modeling. Salinity loading erosion risk indices w

This is the fifty-fifth in a series of annual reports that describe groundwater conditions in Utah. Reports in this series, published cooperatively by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Utah Department of Natural Resources, Division of Water Rights, and the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, Division of Water Quality, provide data to enable interested parties to maintain awareness of changi

Given the predicted imbalance between water supply and demand in the Southwest region of the United States, and the widespread problems with excessive nutrients and suspended sediment, there is a growing need to quantify current streamflow and water quality conditions throughout the region. Furthermore, current monitoring stations exist at a limited number of locations, and many streams lack strea

Salinity has a major effect on water users in the Colorado River Basin, estimated to cause almost $300 million per year in economic damages. The Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Program implements and manages projects to reduce salinity loads, investing millions of dollars per year in irrigation upgrades, canal projects, and other mitigation strategies. To inform and improve mitigation effort

Sand Hollow Reservoir in Washington County, Utah, was completed in March 2002 and is operated primarily for managed aquifer recharge by the Washington County Water Conservancy District. From 2002 through 2016, surface-water diversions of about 256,000 acre-feet (acre-ft) to Sand Hollow Reservoir have allowed the reservoir to remain nearly full since 2006. Groundwater levels in monitoring wells nea

Climate change influences on mountain hydrology are uncertain, but likely to be mediated through changes in subsurface hydrologic residence times and flowpaths. The heterogeneity of karst aquifers add complexity in assessing the resiliency of these water sources to perturbation, suggesting a clear need to quantify contributions from and losses to these aquifers. Here we develop a stream centric me

Pah Tempe Springs, located in Washington County, Utah, contribute about 95,000 tons of dissolved solids annually along a 1,500-foot gaining reach of the Virgin River. The river gains more than 10 cubic feet per second along the reach as thermal, saline springwater discharges from dozens of orifices located along the riverbed and above the river on both banks. The spring complex discharges from fra

The groundwater model described in this report is a new version of previously published steady-state numerical groundwater flow models of the Great Basin carbonate and alluvial aquifer system, and was developed in conjunction with U.S. Geological Survey studies in Parowan, Pine, and Wah Wah Valleys, Utah. This version of the model is GBCAAS v. 3.0 and supersedes previous versions. The objectives o

The myriad hydrologic and biogeochemical processes taking place in watersheds occurring across space and time are integrated and reflected in the quantity and quality of water in streams and rivers. Collection of high‐frequency water quality data with sensors in surface waters provides new opportunities to disentangle these processes and quantify sources and transport of water and solutes in the c