Publications

In terrestrial and marine ecosystems, remote sensing has been used to estimate gross primary productivity (GPP) for decades, but few applications exist for shallow freshwater ecosystems.Here we show field-based GPP correlates with satellite and airborne lake color across a range of optically and limnologically diverse lakes in interior Alaska. A strong relationship between in situ GPP...

Novel forms of drought are emerging globally, due to climate change, shifting teleconnection patterns, expanding human water use, and a history of human influence on the environment that increases the probability of transformational ecological impacts. These costly ecological impacts cascade to human communities, and understanding this changing drought landscape is one of today’s grand...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, used surface and borehole geophysical methods to delineate the freshwater/saltwater interface in coastal plain aquifers along the southwestern part of Long Island, New York. Over pumping of groundwater in the early 20th century combined with freshwater/saltwater interfaces at the...

Water-quality conditions (including temperature) in the Willamette River and many of its adjacent off-channel features, such as alcoves and side channels, were monitored between river miles 67 (near Salem, Oregon) and 168 (near Eugene, Oregon) during the summers of 2015 and 2016. One or more parameters (water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, specific conductance, and [or] water depth)...

Mercury (Hg) is a naturally occurring element that bonds with organic matter and, when converted to methylmercury, is a potent neurotoxicant. Here we estimate potential future releases of Hg from thawing permafrost for low and high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios using a mechanistic model. By 2200, the high emissions scenario shows annual permafrost Hg emissions to the atmosphere...

Power consumption coefficients (PCCs) and dedicated flowmeter records for irrigation wells in three Utah groundwater basins were analyzed to develop a method to better characterize the accuracy of annual groundwater withdrawal estimates. The PCC method has been used by the U.S. Geological Survey in Utah since 1963 as a way to estimate groundwater withdrawal. As a result, most irrigation...

Retention, processing, and transport of solutes and particulates in stream corridors are influenced by the travel time of streamflow through stream channels, which varies dynamically with discharge. The effects of streamflow variability across sites and over time cannot be addressed by time-averaged models if parameters are based solely on the characteristics of mean streamflow. We...

High salinity limits groundwater use in parts of the Mississippi embayment. Machine learning was used to create spatially continuous and three‐dimensional predictions of salinity across drinking‐water aquifers in the embayment. Boosted regression tree (BRT) models, a type of machine learning, were used to predict specific conductance (SC) and chloride (Cl), and total dissolved solids...

The Delaware River Basin (DRB) supplies water to approximately 15 million people and is essential to agriculture and industry. In this study, a monthly water balance model is used to compute monthly water balance components (i.e., potential evapotranspiration, actual evapotranspiration, and runoff [R]) for the DRB for the 1901 through 2015 period. Water‐year R is used to identify drought...

Perennial water storage in firn aquifers has been observed within the lower percolation zone of the southeast Greenland ice sheet. Spatially distributed seismic and radar observations, made ~50 km upstream of the Helheim Glacier terminus, reveal spatial variations of seismic velocity within a firn aquifer. From 1.65 to 1.8 km elevation, shear‐wave velocity (Vs) is 1,290 ± 180 m/s in the...

In this investigation, we used a combination of field- and laboratory-based approaches to assess if influenza A viruses (IAVs) shed by ducks could remain viable for extended periods in surface water within three wetland complexes of North America. In a field experiment, replicate filtered surface water samples inoculated with duck swabs were tested for IAVs upon collection and again...

The Glen Canyon Group Aquifer (GCGA) is the sole source of public water supply for the city of Moab, Utah, a domestic and international tourist destination. Population and tourism growth are likely to target the GCGA for future water resources, but our analysis indicates that additional withdrawals would likely be sourced from groundwater storage and not be sustained by recharge. A...