Publications

Since 1950, the U.S. Geological Survey has published a series of Circulars and other reports on the estimated use of water in the United States at 5-year intervals. This report presents State, regional, and county estimates of the amount of water used for domestic, irrigation, and industrial purposes in the State of Washington during the year 2000. Domestic water use was estimated to be...

Epilithic community metabolism was determined on a seasonal basis over two years in nonregulated and regulated reaches of the Clearwater River in northern Idaho, U.S.A. Metabolism was estimated using three, 12-liter recirculating chambers and the dissolved oxygen method, with parameters expressed as g O2 m−2 d−1. In the nonregulated reach above the reservoir, gross community productivity...

We develop a new observation‐prediction (OPR) statistic for evaluating the importance of system state observations to model predictions. The OPR statistic measures the change in prediction uncertainty produced when an observation is added to or removed from an existing monitoring network, and it can be used to guide refinement and enhancement of the network. Prediction uncertainty is...

This Surface-Water Quality-Assurance Plan documents the standards, policies, and procedures used by the U.S. Geological Survey's Washington District, Water Resources Discipline office, also known as the Washington Water Science Center, for activities related to the collection, processing, storage, analysis, and publication of surface-water data. This plan serves as a guide to all...

Studies of reservoir sedimentation are vital to understanding scientific and management issues related to watershed sediment budgets, depositional processes, reservoir operations, and dam decommissioning. Here we quantify the mass, organic content, and grain-size distribution of a reservoir deposit in northern California by two methods of extrapolating measurements of sediment physical...

Macroinvertebrate assemblages and environmental variables were evaluated at 45 stream sites throughout the Puget Sound Basin, Washington, USA. Environmental variables were measured at 3 spatial scales: reach, local, and whole watershed. Macroinvertebrate distributions were related to environmental variables using canonical correspondence analysis to determine which variables and spatial...

A study of the water resources of the ground-water system in the unconsolidated deposits of the Colville River Watershed provided the Colville River Watershed Planning Team with an assessment of the hydrogeologic framework, preliminary determinations of how the shallow and deeper parts of the ground-water system interact with each other and the surface-water system, descriptions of water...

Spatial and temporal variations in concentrations and loads of suspended sediment and nutrients in surface water of the Yakima River Basin were assessed using data collected during 1999?2000 as part of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program. Samples were collected at 34 sites located throughout the Basin in August 1999 using a Lagrangian...

Starting in 1979 with the SMMR (Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer) instrument onboard the satellite NIMBUS-7 and continuing since 1987 with the SSMI (Special Sensor Microwave Imager) instrument on board the DMSP (Defence Meteorological Satellite Program) series, more then twenty years of satellite passive microwave data are now available. This dataset has been processed to...

This paper presents an algorithm that estimates the spatial distribution and temporal evolution of snow water equivalent and snow depth based on passive remote sensing measurements. It combines the inversion of passive microwave remote sensing measurements via dense media radiative transfer modeling results with snow accumulation and melt model predictions to yield improved estimates of...

In 2001, the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program began an intensive study of nutrient enrichment elevated concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus in streams in five agricultural basins across the Nation (see map, p. 2). This study is providing nationally consistent and comparable data and analyses of nutrient conditions, including how these...

No abstract available.