Common Water Issues

The USGS Next Generation Water Observing System (NGWOS) provides high-fidelity, real-time data on water quantity and quality necessary to support modern water prediction and decision support systems for water emergencies and daily water operations. The Delaware River Basin was the first NGWOS basin, providing an opportunity to implement the program in a nationally important, complex interstate...

This website compiles USGS resources and data related to principal aquifers including Aquifer Basics, principal aquifers maps and GIS data, and the National Aquifer Code Reference List.

Flood-frequency analysis provides information about the magnitude and frequency of floods based on records of annual maximum instantaneous peak discharges. Accurate flood-frequency estimates, created using consistent and uniformly applied methods, are a key component of any effective flood risk and management program. This is a list of current USGS flood frequency reports published by state.

Powder River rises in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and flows northward through a semi-arid landscape in Wyoming and Montana to the Yellowstone River. The river drains an area of 34,700 square kilometers and has an average discharge of about 500 million cubic meters per year. Cross-channel profile data were collected at 22 sites on the river and its tributaries from 1975 through 2014.

Together with partner organizations, the USGS is involved in data collection, analysis, and synthesis to improve estimates of coastal wetland carbon fluxes. This research will help improve science and data availability across a wide range of topics.

Since 1969, the U.S. Geological Survey has maintained a research project in the San Francisco Bay-Delta system to measure and understand how estuarine systems and tidal river deltas function and change in response to hydro-climatic variability and human activities.

In 2019, the USGS began studying the baseline water-quality of selected transboundary rivers in the Pacific Northwest. These studies are designed to characterize current water-quality conditions so as to facilitate future assessments of potential impacts related to upstream mining activities.

Declining snow cover is playing a key role in decreasing the flow of the Colorado River, “the lifeblood of the Southwest,” by enabling increased evaporation. As the warming continues, increasingly severe water shortages are expected.

The USGS National Hydrologic Model (NHM) infrastructure supports the efficient construction of local-, regional-, and national-scale hydrologic models. The NHM infrastructure consists of: 1) an underlying geospatial fabric of modeling units with an associated parameter database, 2) a model input data archive, and 3) a repository of the physical model simulation code bases.

The Intergovernmental (formerly International) Hydrological Programme (IHP) is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) international scientific cooperative program in water research, water resources management, education, and capacity building.

USGS water-related projects of international interest.

SPARROW mappers are interactive tools that allow the user to explore river streamflow and nutrient and sediment loads and yields and the importance of different sources of contaminants in a particular river basin. Data can be visualized using maps and interactive graphs and tables, and rankings can be shown by state, major watershed, hydrologic unit (HUC), and catchment.