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Search indexed USGS publications on groundwater, aquifers, geologic maps, mineral resources and earthquakes. Explore source records by subject and place.

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At least 559 records · Page 31Linked to original sources
USGS2014

Discussion of “Annual floods and the partial duration flood series”

The writer is interested in finding from this paper a similar idea which he had in mind when engaging in a statistical study of hydrologic data, a part of the Highway Drainage Research Project being carried out in the Department of Civil Engineering, the University of Illinois. However, a complete presentation of the study will be reserved for future publications, and only fragments of thought are discussed here. In treating hydrologic data for the study of their frequency of recurrence, two phases of study are generally met. One is the frequency of recurrence for the observed distributions, and the other is the corresponding frequency of recurrence for the theoretical distributions of best‐fit. The former is usually required for the purpose of plotting observed data, and hence is called the “plotting positions,” a term used by Foster [1934, p. 1217]. The latter is treated by the mathematical theory of probability, and generally serves as a theoretical interpretation of the observed phenomena.

Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union↗
USGS2006

Panel: Eco-informatics and decision making managing our natural resources

This panel responds to the December 2004 workshop on Eco-Informatics and Decision Making [1], which addressed how informatics tools can help with better management of natural resources and policy making. The workshop was jointly sponsored by the NSF, NBII, NASA, and EPA. Workshop participants recommended that informatics research in four IT areas be funded: modeling and simulation, data quality, information integration and ontologies, and social and human aspects. Additionally, they recommend that funding agencies provide infrastructure and some changes in funding habits to assure cycles of innovation in the domain were addressed. This panel brings issues raised in that workshop to the attention of digital government researchers.

Conference Paper↗
USGS2023

Assessment of a new GeoAI foundation model for floodinundation mapping

Vision foundation models are a new frontier in GeoAI research because of their potential to enable powerful image analysis by analyzing and extracting important image features from vast amounts of geospatial data. This paper evaluates the performance of the first-of-its-kind geospatial foundation model, IBM-NASA’s Prithvi, to support a crucial geospatial analysis task: flood inundation mapping. This model is compared with popular convolutional neural networks and vision transformer-based architectures regarding mapping accuracy for flooded areas. A benchmark dataset, Sen1Floods11, is used in the experiments, and the models' predictability, generalizability, and transferability are evaluated based on both validation datasets and datasets completely unseen by the model. Results show the impressive transferability of the Prithvi model, highlighting its performance advantages in segmenting flooded areas in previously unseen regions. The findings also suggest areas for improvement for the Prithvi model in adopting multi-scale representation learning, developing more end-to-end pipelines for high-level image analysis tasks, and offering more flexibility in allowable input data bands.

Conference Paper↗
USGS2022

Integrating urban planning and water management through green infrastructure in the United States-Mexico border

Creating sustainable, resilient, and livable cities calls for integrative approaches and collaborative practices across temporal and spatial scales. However, practicability is challenged by institutional, social, and technical complexities and the need to build collective understanding of integrated approaches. Rapid urbanization along the United States-Mexico border, fueled by industrialization, trade, and migration, has resulted in cities confronted with recurrent flooding risk, extended drought, water pollution, habitat destruction and systemic vulnerabilities. The international border, which separates natural and built ecosystems, is both a challenge and an opportunity, making a unique social and institutional setting ideal for testing the integration of urban planning and water management. Our research focuses on fusing multi-functional and multi-scalar green infrastructure to restore ecosystem services through a strategic binational planning process. This paper describes this planning process, including the development and application of both a land suitability analysis and a hydrological model to optimally site green infrastructure in the Nogales, Arizona, United States—Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, cross border region. We draw lessons from this process and stakeholder feedback focused on the potential for urban green infrastructure, to allow for adaptation and even transformation in the face of current and future challenges such as limited resources, underdeveloped governance, bordering, and climate change. In sum, a cross border network of green infrastructure can provide a backbone to connect this transboundary watershed while providing both hydrological and social benefits.

Frontiers in Water↗
USGS2010

Visible and infrared remote imaging of hazardous waste: A review

One of the critical global environmental problems is human and ecological exposure to hazardous wastes from agricultural, industrial, military and mining activities. These wastes often include heavy metals, hydrocarbons and other organic chemicals. Traditional field and laboratory detection and monitoring of these wastes are generally expensive and time consuming. The synoptic perspective of overhead remote imaging can be very useful for the detection and remediation of hazardous wastes. Aerial photography has a long and effective record in waste site evaluations. Aerial photographic archives allow temporal evaluation and change detection by visual interpretation. Multispectral aircraft and satellite systems have been successfully employed in both spectral and morphological analysis of hazardous wastes on the landscape and emerging hyperspectral sensors have permitted determination of the specific contaminants by processing strategies using the tens or hundreds of acquired wavelengths in the solar reflected and/or thermal infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. This paper reviews the literature of remote sensing and overhead imaging in the context of hazardous waste and discusses future monitoring needs and emerging scientific research areas.

Remote Sensing↗
USGS1995

Can we manage for biological diversity in the absence of science?

Conservation of biological diversity is dependent on sound scientific information about underlying ecological processes. Current knowledge of the composition, distribution, abundance and life cycles of most species of plants and animals is incomplete, insufficient, unreliable, or nonexistent. Contemporary managers are also confronted with additional levels of complexity related to varying degrees of knowledge and understanding about interactions of species and ecosystems. Consequently, traditional species-oriented management schemes may have unintended consequences and ecosystem-oriented management initiatives may fail in the face of inadequate or fragmentary information on the structure, function, and dynamics of biotic communities and ecological systems. Nevertheless, resource managers must make decisions and manage based on the best biological information currently available. Adaptive resource management may represent a management paradigm that allows managers to learn something about the species or systems that they are managing while they are managing, but potential pitfalls lurk for such approaches. In addition to lack of control over the primary physical, chemical, and ecological processes, managers also lack control over social, economic, and political parameters affecting resource management options. Moreover, appropriate goals may be difficult to identify and criteria for determining success may be elusive. Some management responsibilities do not lend themselves to adaptive strategies. Finally, the lessons learned from adaptive management are usually obtained from a highly situational context that may limit applicability in a wider range of situations or undermine confidence that problems and solutions were properly diagnosed and addressed. Several scenarios are critically examined where adaptive management approaches may be inappropriate or ineffective and where management for biological diversity may be infeasible or inefficient without a sound scientific basis. Whereas some level of management must exist to meet agency responsibilities, more research is needed to conserve biological diversity.

Wildlife Society Annual Conference↗
USGS1994

Relation between largest known flood discharge and elevation in Montana

Previous studies relating unit discharge to elevation indicated that large floods in the Rocky Mountains may be limited by elevation. However, high-elevation data are sparse in Montana and the indications may not be entirely correct. Based on data at 19 sites in Montana, a strong log-linear relation exists between large-flood discharge and drainage area. The use of unit discharge (peak discharge divided by drainage area) to compare flood magnitude from site to site may thus be biased and tend to overstate flood magnitude for small basins. Removal of the bias by use of a revised unit discharge (peak discharge divided by drainage area raised to the 0.16 power) results in no apparent relation between revised unit discharge and elevation in two areas of Montana. However, because of a paucity of data, the magnitude of revised unit discharge at elevations greater than 1,650 m is largely unknown. Additional data and research are needed to resolve questions about mountain flood hydrology.

Conference Paper↗
USGS1994

Historic-flood evaluation and research needs in mountainous areas

An evaluation of historic flood estimates in mountainous areas in Colorado was made to assess their accuracy. The purpose of this evaluation is to enhance awareness of the need to assess the accuracy of historic flood peaks, particularly floods of record, because they are such a critical factor in flood-plain management, design of hydraulic structures in flood plains, and related environmental studies. Research needs based on a proposed river-system-process approach are suggested. A critical need exists for interdisciplinary documentation of extreme-flood processes, particularly to improve methods to directly measure extreme floods and quantify total energy losses. Such research will benefit the public through improved engineering designs and environmental investigations.

Conference Paper↗
USGS2006

Special issue: Terrestrial fluids, earthquakes and volcanoes: The Hiroshi Wakita volume I

Terrestrial Fluids, Earthquakes and Volcanoes: The Hiroshi Wakita Volume I is a special publication to honor Professor Hiroshi Wakita for his scientific contributions. This volume consists of 17 original papers dealing with various aspects of the role of terrestrial fluids in earthquake and volcanic processes, which reflect Prof. Wakita’s wide scope of research interests. Professor Wakita co-founded the Laboratory for Earthquake Chemistry in 1978 and served as its director from 1988 until his retirement from the university in 1997. He has made the laboratory a leading world center for studying earthquakes and volcanic activities by means of geochemical and hydrological methods. Together with his research team and a number of foreign guest researchers that he attracted, he has made many significant contributions in the above-mentioned scientific fields of interest. This achievement is a testimony to not only his scientific talent, but also his enthusiasm, his open mindedness, and his drive in obtaining both human and financial support.

Pure and Applied Geophysics↗
USGS2022

Improving the Development Pipelines for USGS Earthquake Hazards Program Real-Time and Scenario Products

The real-time and scenario products of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earthquake Hazards Program, such as the ComCat catalog, Did You Feel It?, ShakeMap, ShakeCast, and PAGER, are highly visible and used by a wide variety of stakeholders. We propose two significant enhancements to the development pipelines for the Earthquake Hazards Program real-time and scenario products that have far-reaching benefits. First, we propose incorporating processed and archived ground-motion records into the data streams for real-time products. This increases reproducibility and transparency for ShakeMap and downstream products that serve critical functions in earthquake response and long-term research. It will also provide comprehensive, open access databases of ground-motion metrics (for example, peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity, and acceleration response spectra) and ground-motion time histories that are fundamental tools in most engineering seismology studies. Second, we propose extending the pipeline for scenario products to provide a full set of complementary products to the real-time pipeline. This would define a comprehensive set of standards for archiving scenarios, including three-dimensional ground-motion simulations, and allow the suite of scenario products to be disseminated in the same way as real-time products. Ultimately, these enhancements would increase the value of some of the most important Earthquake Hazards Program products and transform the way USGS scientists and the engineering seismology community conduct ground-motion research.

Conference Paper↗