Publications
This list of Water Resources Mission Area publications includes both official USGS publications and journal articles authored by our scientists. A searchable database of all USGS publications can be accessed at the USGS Publications Warehouse.
Filter Total Items: 18454
Paired comparisons with quiet surface drones show evidence of fish behavioral response to motorized vessels during acoustic surveys in Lake Superior
Acoustic surveys are important for fish stock assessments, but fish responses to survey vessels can bias acoustic estimates. We leveraged quiet uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) to characterize potential bias in acoustic surveys. Five conventional motorized ships overtook USVs from astern over 2 km transects at night in Lake Superior in 2022. We examined the difference in acoustic backscatter, avera
Authors
Thomas M. Evans, Lars G. Rudstam, Suresh A Sethi, Daniel Yule, David Warner, Steve A. Farha, Andrew R. Barnard, Mark Richard Dufour, Timothy P. O'Brien, Kayden Nasworthy, Ian Harding, Bradley A. Ray, Edmund J. Isaac, Joshua Blankenheim, Hannah B. Blair, James M. Watkins, Steven A. Senczyszyn, James Roberts, Peter C. Esselman
Water-quality constituent concentrations and loads computed using real-time water-quality data for the Republican River, Clay Center, Kansas, August 2018 through July 2023
Milford Lake, the largest reservoir by surface area in Kansas, has had confirmed harmful algal blooms every summer since reporting began in 2011, except 2018–19. Milford Lake has been listed as impaired and designated hypereutrophic under section 303(d) of the 1972 Clean Water Act. In 2014, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment established a total maximum daily load for eutrophication an
Authors
Ariele R. Kramer, Justin R. Abel
Wildland fire effects on sediment, salinity, and selenium yields in a basin underlain by Cretaceous marine shales near Rangely, Colorado
Understanding and quantifying soil erosion from rangelands is a high priority for land managers, especially in areas underlain by Cretaceous Mancos Shale, which is a natural source of sediment, salinity, and selenium to surface waters in many areas of western Colorado and eastern Utah. The purpose of this report is to present the results of a U.S. Geological Survey study that assessed sediment, sa
Authors
Natalie K. Day, Todd M. Preston, Patrick C. Longley
Monitoring and simulation of hydrology, suspended sediment, and nutrients in selected tributary watersheds of Lake Erie, New York
The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with Erie County, New York, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, collected water-quality samples in nine selected New York tributaries to Lake Erie, computed estimates of suspended sediment and nutrient loads using the R scripting package rloadest and used the Soil and Water Assessment To
Authors
Katherine R. Merriman, Benjamin N. Fisher, Elizabeth A. Nystrom, Aubrey R. Bunch, Robert J. Welk, William M. Kappel
Redistribution of debris-flow sediment following severe wildfire and floods in the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico, USA
Severe fire on steep slopes increases stormwater runoff and the occurrence of runoff-initiated debris flows. Predicting locations of debris flows and their downstream effects on trunk streams requires watershed-scale high-resolution topographic data. Intense precipitation in July and September 2013 following the June 2011 Las Conchas Fire in the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico, led to widespread debri
Authors
J. M. Friedman, Anne C. Tillery, Samuel J. Alfieri, Elizabeth Rachaelann Skaggs, Patrick B. Shafroth, Craig D. Allen
Revision of ModelMuse to support the use of PEST software with MODFLOW and SUTRA models
Executive SummaryModelMuse is a graphical user interface for several groundwater modeling programs. ModelMuse was updated to generate the input files for the parameter estimation software suite PEST. The software is used with MODFLOW or SUTRA models to run PEST-based parameter estimation and display the updated model inputs after parameter estimation. The PEST input files can also be used with the
Authors
Richard B. Winston
Riverine dissolved organic matter transformations increase with watershed area, water residence time, and Damköhler numbers in nested watersheds
Quantifying the relative influence of factors and processes controlling riverine ecosystem function is essential to predicting future conditions under global change. Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is a fundamental component of riverine ecosystems that fuels microbial food webs, influences nutrient and light availability, and represents a significant carbon flux globally. The heterogeneous nature o
Authors
Kevin Alexander Ryan, Vanessa Garayburu-Caruso, Byron Crump, Ted Bambakidis, Peter Raymond, Shaoda Liu, James Stegen
A literature review and hypsometric analysis to support decisions on trout management flows on the Colorado River downstream from Glen Canyon Dam
Executive SummaryFish stranding has been studied in select rivers worldwide, often with the purpose of determining how to mitigate adverse effects of dam operations on highly valued salmon and trout populations. However, where a reduction in trout population size is desired by resource managers, as is the case downstream of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, flow manipulations termed trout
Authors
Mariah Giardina, Josh Korman, Michael D. Yard, Scott Wright, Matthew A. Kaplinski, Glenn Bennett
Triangle Area Water Supply Monitoring Project, North Carolina
IntroductionRivers and surface-water reservoirs supply drinking water to most residents throughout the Triangle area in North Carolina. These drinking-water supplies may be at risk because of rapid and continued land use change throughout the region. In partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey, several Triangle-area municipalities established a long-term water-quality and streamflow monitoring
Authors
R. Fanelli, D. Hardesty, J. Diaz
Assessing potential effects of oil and gas development activities on groundwater quality near and overlying the Elk Hills and North Coles Levee Oil Fields, San Joaquin Valley, California
Groundwater resources are utilized near areas of intensive oil and gas development in California’s San Joaquin Valley. In this study, we examined chemical and isotopic data to assess if thermogenic gas or saline water from oil producing formations have mixed with groundwater near the Elk Hills and North Coles Levee Oil Fields in the southwestern San Joaquin Valley. Major ion concentrations and sta
Authors
John G. Warden, Matthew K. Landon, Michael J. Stephens, Tracy Davis, Janice M. Gillespie, Peter B. McMahon, Justin T. Kulongoski, Andrew Hunt, David H. Shimabukuro, Riley Gannon, Lyndsay B. Ball
Low-flow statistics for selected streams in New York, excluding Long Island
The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, updated low-streamflow statistics for New York, excluding Long Island and including hydrologically connected watersheds in bordering States, for the first time since 1972. Historical daily streamflow data for active and inactive gages were considered for this study with periods of record as
Authors
Timothy J. Stagnitta, Alexander P. Graziano, Joshua C. Woda, Robin L. Glas, Christopher L. Gazoorian
Lake water storage
No abstract available.
Authors
Merritt Elizabeth Harlan, Benjamin M. Kraemer, Tyler Victor King, Sofia La Fuente, Michael Frederick Meyer