Publications

The U.S. Geological Survey worked in cooperation with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to assess the potential sources of fecal contamination entering a part of Great South Bay (referred to as Great South Bay for the purposes of this report) near the hamlets of West Sayville, Sayville, and Bayport on the southern shore of Suffolk County on Long Island, New York. Water sa

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Montana Department of Transportation, installed cameras and large-scale particle image velocimetry (LSPIV) recording equipment at four sites where the U.S. Geological Survey and Montana Department of Transportation are monitoring bridge scour using other methods. Determination of stream velocities is an important component of hydraulic engineerin

The Landsat mission has kept an eye on our planet, including water bodies, for 50 years. With the launch of Landsat-9 and its onboard Operational Land Imager 2 (OLI-2) in September 2021, more subtle variations in brightness (14-bit dynamic range) can be captured than previous sensors in the Landsat series (e.g., 12-bit Landsat-8). The enhanced radiometric resolution of OLI-2 appeals to the aquatic

Streamgage record extension methods such as the maintenance of variance Type 3 (MOVE3) method improve flood frequency estimates at a target streamgage by incorporating information from a nearby, hydrologically similar index streamgage. Bulletin 17C recommends using a variation of the MOVE3 method to estimate values at the target streamgage for only a subset of the available data at the index strea

Geoenvironmental models were formulated by the U.S. Geological Survey in the 1990s to describe potential environmental effects of extracting different types of ore deposits in different geologic and climatic regions. This paper presents a geoenvironmental model for roll-front (roll-type) uranium deposits in the Texas Coastal Plain. The model reviews descriptive and quantitative information derived

Radium (Ra) is a geogenic contaminant that occurs at high levels in the Midwestern Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer system (MCOAS), a regionally important sandstone and carbonate drinking water aquifer. Water utilities using the MCOAS often must adopt treatment methods or use alternative water sources to maintain high-quality drinking water. Here, we show that Ra in water obtained from a municipal well

A soil-water-balance (SWB) model was developed for Long Island, New York, to estimate the potential amount of annual groundwater recharge to the Long Island aquifer system from 1900 to 2019. The SWB model program is a computer code based on a modified Thornthwaite-Mather SWB approach and uses spatially and temporally distributed meteorological, land-cover, and soil properties as input to compute p

The Salton Trough (southeastern California, USA) is the northernmost transtensional stepover of the Gulf of California oblique-divergent plate boundary and is also where the southern terminus of the San Andreas fault occurs. Until recently, the distribution of active faults in and around the Salton Sea and their displacement histories were largely unknown. Subbottom CHIRP (compressed high-intensit

Altered hydrology is a stressor on aquatic life for several streams in Minnesota, but quantitative relations between specific aspects of streamflow alteration and biological responses have not been developed on a statewide scale in Minnesota. Best subsets regression analysis was used to develop linear regression models that quantify relations among five categories of hydrologic explanatory metric

Algal blooms around the world are increasing in frequency and severity, often with the possibility of adverse effects on human and ecosystem health. The health and economic impacts associated with harmful algal blooms, or HABs, provide compelling rationale for developing new methods for monitoring these events via remote sensing. Although concentrations of chlorophyll-a and key pigments like phyco

A geoenvironmental assessment methodology was developed to estimate waste quantities and disturbances that could be associated with the extraction of undiscovered uranium resources and identify areas on the landscape where uranium and other constituents of potential concern (COPCs) that may co-occur with uranium deposits in this region are likely to persist, if introduced into the environment. Pri

The ongoing 22 year drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB) has been extremely severe, even in the context of the longest available tree-ring reconstruction of annual flow at Lees Ferry, Arizona, dating back to 762 CE. While many southwestern drought assessments have been limited to the past 1200 years, longer paleorecords of moisture variability do exist for the UCRB. Here, gridded droug