The U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) mission is to provide reliable scientific information about the Nation's natural resources. An integral part of that mission is to provide consistent, long-term water-resources data to customers, cooperators, and the public. To accomplish our mission, we operate a widespread surface and ground-water data collection network as well as research a wide range of scientific issues throughout Iowa.

New Flood Technology Gets Information out Faster

Des Moines, Iowa is now better prepared to issue flood alerts because of enhancements to river monitoring equipment put in place by the City of Des Moines Department of Public Works and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Download this video as a: [.mp4 .m4v .webm]

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Watershed Scale Response to Climate Change - Clear Creek Basin, Iowa

General Circulation Model simulations of future climate through 2099 project a wide range of possible scenarios. To determine the sensitivity and potential effect of long-term climate change on the freshwater resources of the United States, the U.S. Geological Survey Global Change study, "An integrated watershed scale response to global change in selected basins across the United States" was started in 2008. The long-term goal of this national study is to provide the foundation for hydrologically based climate change studies across the nation.

Fourteen basins for which the Precipitation Runoff Modeling System has been calibrated and evaluated were selected as study sites. Precipitation Runoff Modeling System is a deterministic, distributed parameter watershed model developed to evaluate the effects of various combinations of precipitation, temperature, and land use on streamflow and general basin hydrology. Output from five General Circulation Model simulations and four emission scenarios were used to develop an ensemble of climate-change scenarios for each basin. These ensembles were simulated with the corresponding Precipitation Runoff Modeling System model. This fact sheet summarizes the hydrologic effect and sensitivity of the Precipitation Runoff Modeling System simulations to climate change for the Clear Creek Basin, near Coralville, Iowa.

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Integrated Watershed-Scale Response to Climate Change for Selected Basins Across the United States

A study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) evaluated the hydrologic response to different projected carbon emission scenarios of the 21st century using a hydrologic simulation model. This study involved five major steps: (1) setup, calibrate and evaluated the Precipitation Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) model in 14 basins across the United States by local USGS personnel; (2) acquire selected simulated carbon emission scenarios from the World Climate Research Programme's Coupled Model Intercomparison Project; (3) statistical downscaling of these scenarios to create PRMS input files which reflect the future climatic conditions of these scenarios; (4) generate PRMS projections for the carbon emission scenarios for the 14 basins; and (5) analyze the modeled hydrologic response. This report presents an overview of this study, details of the methodology, results from the 14 basin simulations, and interpretation of these results.

A key finding is that the hydrological response of the different geographical regions of the United States to potential climate change may be different, depending on the dominant physical processes of that particular region. Also considered is the tremendous amount of uncertainty present in the carbon emission scenarios and how this uncertainty propagates through the hydrologic simulations.

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Selected Water-Quality Data from the Cedar River and Cedar Rapids Well Fields, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

The Cedar River alluvial aquifer is the primary source of municipal water in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa area. The City of Cedar Rapids and the U.S. Geological Survey have been conducting a cooperative study of the groundwater-flow system and water quality of the aquifer since 1992. Cooperative reports between the City of Cedar Rapids and the U.S. Geological Survey have documented hydrologic and water-quality data, geochemistry, and groundwater models. This report presents the results of water-quality analyses of routine quarterly samples from monitoring wells, municipal wells, and the Cedar River from January 2006 through December 2010. Water-quality data include major ions, nutrients, dissolved organic carbon, and selected pesticides including two degradates of the herbicide atrazine. Methods of data collection, quality-assurance, water-quality analyses, and statistical procedures are presented.

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Environmental Settings of the South Fork Iowa River Basin, Iowa, and the Bogue Phalia Basin, Mississippi

Studies of the transport and fate of agricultural chemicals in different environmental settings were conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program's Agricultural Chemicals Team (ACT) in the South Fork Iowa River basin in central Iowa and the Bogue Phalia basin in northwestern Mississippi. The South Fork Iowa River basin is representative of midwestern agriculture, where corn and soybeans are the predominant crops and a large percentage of the cultivated land is underlain by artificial drainage. The Bogue Phalia basin is representative of corn, soybean, cotton, and rice cropping in the humid, subtropical southeastern United States. Details of the environmental settings of these basins and the data-collection activities conducted during the 2006-10 study period are described in this report.

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USGS Presentation:
Exploration of Streamflow Changes at Decadal to Century Time Scales

Speaker: Dr Robert Hirsch, USGS Research Hydrologist
Time: Thursday March 8th, 2012 at 1:00PM
Location: Main floor of the Wallace Building in Des Moines (502 E 9th St). [Map]

The upper Midwest and eastern Prairies (Eastern North and South Dakota and Nebraska plus large parts of Minnesota and Iowa) have experienced very large and very persistent changes in streamflow conditions over the past 120 years. This presentation will use graphical approaches to time-series analysis to explore streamflow records from around this region: in terms of flood flows, average flows, and low flows. Questions considered include the role of long-term persistent behavior in the climate system (quasi-periodic oscillations), the role of land-use and land-drainage changes, and the role of human-enhanced greenhouse forcing. Results from this region are compared with other parts of the U.S., particularly other areas where snow plays a significant role in the hydrologic cycle. The recently published Hirsch and Ryberg study of nationwide flooding trends will also be described.

Robert Hirschs biography.

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2011 Floods - Science Efforts of the U.S. Geological Survey

2011 proved to be a record-setting year for flooding in the central United States, with floods that extended from headwater streams in the Rocky Mountains, to trans-boundary rivers in the upper Midwest and North?rn Plains, to the deep and wide sand-bedded lower Mississippi River. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as part of its mission, collected extensive information during and in the aftermath of the 2011 floods to support scientific analysis of the origins and consequences of extreme floods. The information collected for the 2011 floods, combined with decades of past data, enables scientists and engineers from the USGS to provide syntheses and scientific analyses to inform emer?ency managers, planners, and policy makers about life-safety, economic, and environmental-health issues surroundOng flood hazards for the 2011 floods and future floods like it.

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Impacts of Climate Change on the Growing Season in the United States

Understanding the effects of climate change on the vegetative growing season is key to quantifying future hydrologic water budget conditions. The U.S. Geological Survey modeled changes in future growing season length at 14 basins across 11 states. The Clear Creek basin, 1 of the 14 basins in this study, was evaluated to examine the growing season length determined by emission scenario,as compared to a growing season length fixed baseline condition. The Clear Creek basin showed substantial variation in hydrologic responses, including streamflow, as a result of growing season length determined by emission scenario.

This report was part of a collection of similar studies that can be found at the American Meteorological Society's page, Integrated Watershed-Scale Response to Climate Change in Selected Basins across the United States.

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Floods of July 23-26, 2010, in the Little Maquoketa River and Maquoketa River Basins, Northeast Iowa

Minor flooding occurred July 23, 2010, in the Little Maquoketa River Basin and major flooding occurred July 23-26, 2010, in the Maquoketa River Basin in northeast Iowa following severe thunderstorm activity over the region during July 22-24. A breach of the Lake Delhi Dam on July 24 aggravated flooding on the Maquoketa River. Rain gages at Manchester and Strawberry Point, Iowa, recorded 72-hour-rainfall amounts of 7.33 and 12.23 inches, respectively, on July 24. The majority of the rainfall occurred during a 48-hour period. Within the Little Maquoketa River Basin, a peak-discharge estimate of 19,000 cubic feet per second (annual flood-probability estimate of 4 to 10 percent) at the discontinued 05414500 Little Maquoketa River near Durango, Iowa streamgage on July 23 is the sixth largest flood on record.

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