The consequences of neglecting reservoir storage in national-scale hydrologic models: An appraisal of key streamflow statistics
Glenn A. Hodgkins, Thomas M. Over, Robert W. Dudley, Amy M. Russell, Jacob H. LaFontaine
2023, Journal of the American Water Resources Association (60) 110-131
A better understanding of modeled streamflow errors related to basin reservoir storage is needed for large regions, which normally have many ungaged basins with reservoirs. We quantified the difference between modeled and observed streamflows for one process-based and three statistical-transfer hydrologic models, none of which explicitly accounted for reservoir storage....
CGS: Coupled growth and survival model with cohort fairness
Erhu He, Yue Wan, Benjamin Letcher, Jennifer Burlingame Hoyle Fair, Yiquin Xie, Xiaowei Jia
2023, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Fish modeling in complex environments is critical for understanding drivers of population dynamics in aquatic systems. This paper proposes a Bayesian network method for modeling fish survival and growth over multiple connected rivers. Traditional fish survival models capture the effect of multiple environmental drivers (e.g., stream temperature, stream flow)...
A Monte-Carlo chemical budget approach to assess ambient groundwater flow in bedrock open boreholes
Philip Harte
2023, Groundwater Monitoring and Remediation (44) 57-71
In low-permeability rocks, ambient groundwater flow in open boreholes may go undetected using conventional borehole-flowmeter tools and alternative approaches may be needed to identify flow. Understanding ambient flow in open boreholes is important for tracking of cross contamination in groundwater. Chlorinated volatile organic compound (CVOC)...
Evaluation of alternative groundwater-withdrawal scenarios on water levels in Kingsbury Pond, upper Charles River Basin, eastern Massachusetts
Paul M. Barlow, Paul J. Friesz, Jeffrey R. Barbaro
2023, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5083
Kingsbury Pond is a glacial kettle pond in the town of Norfolk, Massachusetts, in the Mill River Basin, which is part of the Upper Charles River Basin in eastern Massachusetts. The pond is hydraulically connected to the surrounding groundwater-flow system, and water levels in the pond fluctuate in response to...
Assessment of factors that influence human water demand for Providence, Rhode Island
Timothy J. Stagnitta, Laura Medalie
2023, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5057
To determine the most relevant climatic and economic factors driving water demand for Providence, Rhode Island, and to further the understanding of human interactions with water availability, linear regression models were developed to estimate single-family and multifamily residential, commercial, and industrial water demand for the service area of Providence Water...
Groundwater residence times in glacial aquifers—A new general simulation-model approach compared to conventional inset models
J. Jeffrey Starn, Leon J. Kauffman, Daniel T. Feinstein
2023, Scientific Investigations Report 2021-5142
Groundwater is important as a drinking-water source and for maintaining base flow in rivers, streams, and lakes. Groundwater quality can be predicted, in part, by its residence time in the subsurface, but the residence-time distribution cannot be measured directly and must be inferred from models. This report compares residence-time distributions...
Satellite remote sensing of river discharge: A framework for assessing the accuracy of discharge estimates made from satellite remote sensing observations
David M. Bjerklie, Michael Durand, James M. LeNoir, Robert W. Dudley, Charon Birkett, John Jones, Merritt Elizabeth Harlan
2023, Journal of Applied Remote Sensing (17)
This research presents an evaluation of the accuracy and uncertainty of estimates of river discharge made using satellite observed data sources as input to a modified form of Manning’s equation. Conventional U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) streamflow gaging station...
A framework for estimating global river discharge from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite mission
Michael Durand, Colin Gleason, Tamlin Pavelsky, Renato Frasson, Michael Turmon, Cedric H. David, Elizabeth Altenau, Nikki Tebaldi, Kevin Larnier, Jerome Monnier, Pierre Olivier Malaterre, Hind Oubanas, George Allen, Brian Astifan, Craig Brinkerhoff, Paul Bates, David M. Bjerklie, Stephen Coss, Robert W. Dudley, Luciana Fengolio, Pierre-Andre Garambois, Augusto Getirana, Peirong Lin, Steven A. Margulis, Pascal Matte, J.Toby Minear, Aggrey Muhebwa, Ming Pan, Daniel L. Peters, Ryan Riggs, Md Safat Sikder, Travis Simmons, Cassie Stuurman, Jay Taneja, Angelica Tarpanelli, Kerstin Schulze, Mohammad Tourian, Jida Wang
2023, Water Resources Research (59)
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will vastly expand measurements of global rivers, providing critical new data sets for both gaged and ungaged basins. SWOT discharge products (available approximately 1 year after launch) will provide discharge for all river that reaches wider than 100 m. In this...
Cross-sectional associations between drinking water arsenic and urinary inorganic arsenic in the US: NHANES 2003-2014
Maya Spaur, Melissa Lombard, Joseph D. Ayotte, Benjamin C. Bostick, Steven N. Chillrud, Ana Navas-Acien, Anne E. Nigra
2023, Environmental Research (227)
Background: Inorganic arsenic is a potent carcinogen and toxicant associated with numerous adverse health outcomes. The contribution of drinking water from private wells and regulated community water systems (CWSs) to total inorganic arsenic exposure is not clear. Objectives: To determine the association between drinking water arsenic estimates and urinary arsenic concentrations...
Preliminary machine learning models of manganese and 1,4-dioxane in groundwater on Long Island, New York
Leslie A. DeSimone
2023, Scientific Investigations Report 2022-5120
Manganese and 1,4-dioxane in groundwater underlying Long Island, New York, were modeled with machine learning methods to demonstrate the use of these methods for mapping contaminants in groundwater in the Long Island aquifer system. XGBoost, a gradient boosted, ensemble tree method, was applied to data from 910 wells for manganese...
Assessing potential effects of climate change on highway-runoff flows and loads in southern New England by using planning-level space-for-time analyses
Lillian C. Jeznach, Gregory E. Granato, Daniel Sharar-Salgado, Susan C. Jones, Daniel Imig
2023, Transportation Research Record, Journal of the Transportation Research Board. (2677) 570-581
Transportation agencies need information about the potential effects of climate change on the volume, quality, and treatment of stormwater to mitigate potential effects of runoff on receiving waters. To address these concerns, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Federal Highway Administration used the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project...
Stream temperature prediction in a shifting environment: The influence of deep learning architecture
Simon Nemer Topp, Janet R. Barclay, Jeremy Alejandro Diaz, Alexander Y. Sun, Xiaowei Jia, Daniel Lubin, Jeffrey M Sadler, Alison P. Appling
2023, Water Resources Research (59)
Stream temperature is a fundamental control on ecosystem health. Recent efforts incorporating process guidance into deep learning models for predicting stream temperature have been shown to outperform existing statistical and physical models. This performance is in part because deep learning architectures can actively learn spatiotemporal relationships that...
2022 drought in New England
Dee-Ann E. McCarthy, James M. LeNoir, Pamela J. Lombard
2023, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5016
Introduction During April through September 2022, much of New England experienced a short but extreme hydrologic drought that was similar to the drought of 2020. By August 2022, Providence, Rhode Island, was declared a Federal disaster area, and New London and Windham counties in Connecticut were declared natural disaster areas. Mandatory...
Estimating streamflow for base flow conditions at partial-record streamgaging stations at Acadia National Park, Maine
Pamela J. Lombard
2023, Scientific Investigations Report 2022-5126
The objective of the work presented in this report is to develop equations that can be used to extend the base flow record at multiple partial-record streamgaging stations at Acadia National Park in eastern coastal Maine based on nearby continuous-record streamgaging stations. Daily mean streamflow values at U.S. Geological Survey...
Groundwater recharge in northern New England: Meteorological drivers and relations with low streamflow
Caitlin Crossett, Glenn A. Hodgkins, Hadley Menk, Lesley-Ann L. Dupigny-Giroux, Robert W. Dudley, Mary D. Lemcke-Stampone, John C. Hammond
2023, Hydrological Processes (37)
Meteorological drivers of groundwater recharge for spring (February–June), fall (October–January), and recharge-year (October–June) recharge seasons were evaluated for northern New England and upstate New York from 1989 to 2018. Monthly groundwater recharge was computed at 21 observation wells by subtracting the water levels at...
Stabilising effects of karstic groundwater on stream fish communities
Nathaniel P. Hitt, Karli M Rogers, Karmann G. Kessler, Martin Briggs, Jennifer Burlingame Hoyle Fair
2023, Ecology of Freshwater Fish (32) 538-551
Although groundwater exchange processes are known to modulate atmospheric influences on stream temperature and flow, the implications for ecological stability are poorly understood. Here, we evaluated temporal change in stream fish communities across a gradient of groundwater influence defined by karst terrain (carbonate parent materials) within...
Gross alpha-particle activity and high 226Ra concentrations do not correspond with high 210Po in the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain aquifers of the United States
Zoltan Szabo, Charles A. Cravotta III, Paul Stackelberg, Kenneth Belitz
2023, Environmental Science & Technology Water (3) 262-274
210Po, which is of human-health concern based on lifetime ingestion cancer risk, is indirectly regulated in drinking water through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s gross alpha-particle activity (GAPA) maximum contaminant level of 15 pCi/L (picocuries per liter). This regulation requires independent measurement of 226Ra for samples exceeding...
Predicted uranium and radon concentrations in New Hampshire (USA) groundwater—Using Multi Order Hydrologic Position as predictors
Richard B. Moore, Kenneth Belitz, Joseph D. Ayotte, Terri L. Arnold, Laura Hayes, Jennifer B. Sharpe, J. Jeffrey Starn
2023, Journal of the American Water Resources Association (59) 127-145
Two radioactive elements, uranium (U) and radon (Rn), which are of potential concern in New Hampshire (NH) groundwater, are investigated. Exceedance probability maps are tools to highlight locations where the concentrations of undesirable substances in the groundwater may be elevated. Two forms of statistical analysis are...
Optical properties of dissolved organic matter in throughfall and stemflow vary across tree species and season in a temperate headwater forest
Kevin A Ryan, Thomas Adler, Ann T. Chalmers, Julia Perdrial, Stephen Sebestyen, James B. Shanley, Aron Stubbins
2023, Biogeochemistry (164) 53-72
Tree-derived dissolved organic matter (DOM) comprises a significant carbon flux within forested watersheds. Few studies have assessed the optical properties of tree-derived DOM. To increase understanding of the factors controlling tree-derived DOM quality, we measured DOM optical properties, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and calcium concentrations in throughfall and stemflow for...
Spatially averaged stratigraphic data to inform watershed sediment routing: An example from the Mid-Atlantic United States
James Pizzuto, Katherine Skalak, Adam Benthem, Shannon A. Mahan, Mahmoud Sherif, Adam Pearson
2023, GSA Bulletin (135) 249-270
New and previously published stratigraphic data define Holocene to present sediment storage time scales for Mid-Atlantic river corridors. Empirical distributions of deposit ages and thicknesses were randomly sampled to create synthetic age-depth records. Deposits predating European settlement accumulated at a (median) rate of 0.06 cm yr−1, range from ∼18,000 to...
VIMTS: Variational-based Imputation for Multi-modal Time Series
Xiaowei Jia, Jennifer Burlingame Hoyle Fair, Benjamin Letcher
2022, Conference Paper, IEEE International Conference on Big Data Proceedings
Multi-modal time series data in real applications often contain data of different dimensionalities, e.g., high-dimensional modality such as image data series, and low-dimensional univariate time series. Multi-modal time series data with missing high-dimensional modal values are ubiquitous in real-world classification and regression applications. To accurately...
Water-quality monitoring of the Merrimack River watershed in Massachusetts
Kaitlin Laabs, Natalie L. Roth, Laura K. Yates
2022, General Information Product 216
The U.S. Geological Survey has been working in collaboration with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection on a project to collect water-quality data from the Merrimack River watershed since April 2020. Twelve locations in the Merrimack River watershed are being sampled for nutrients (such as nitrogen), metals (such as aluminum),...
Assessing the impact of chloride deicer application in the Siskiyou Pass, southern Oregon
Adam J. Stonewall, Matthew C. Yates, Gregory E. Granato
2022, Scientific Investigations Report 2022-5091
Chloride deicers have been applied by the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) to Interstate Route 5 (I–5) from the Oregon-California border north to mile marker 10 for several years in the high-elevation area known as the Siskiyou Pass. Magnesium chloride (MgCl2) and sodium chloride (NaCl) are applied to...
Water-quality conditions and constituent loads, water years 2013–19, and water-quality trends, water years 1983–2019, in the Scituate Reservoir drainage area, Rhode Island
Alana B. Spaetzel, Kirk P. Smith
2022, Scientific Investigations Report 2022-5043
The Scituate Reservoir is the primary source of drinking water for more than 60 percent of the population of Rhode Island. From October 1, 1982, to September 30, 2019, water years (WYs) 1983–2019 (a water year is the period between October 1 and September 30 and is designated by the...
Bedrock depth influences spatial patterns of summer baseflow, temperature and flow disconnection for mountainous headwater streams
Martin Briggs, Phillip J. Goodling, Zachary Johnson, Karli M. Rogers, Nathaniel P. Hitt, Jennifer Burlingame Hoyle Fair, Craig D. Snyder
2022, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (26) 3989-4011
In mountain headwater streams, the quality and resilience of summer cold-water habitat is generally regulated by stream discharge, longitudinal stream channel connectivity and groundwater exchange. These critical hydrologic processes are thought to be influenced by the stream corridor bedrock contact depth (sediment thickness), a parameter often inferred from sparse hillslope...
