Monitoring and Assessing our Nation's Water Quality

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Title Monitoring and Assessing our Nation's Water Quality
Creator Mallard, Gail E.; Hamilton, Pixie A.
Subject Water quality management; Water quality; Sediments (Geology) -- Analysis
Spatial Coverage Rio Grande; Mississippi River; Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico); Columbia River
Description The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has monitored the water quality in the Rio Grande Basin as part of the redesigned National Stream Quality Accounting Network (NASQAN) since 1995 (Hooper and others, 1997). The NASQAN program was designed to characterize the concentrations and transport of sediment and selected chemical constituents found in the Nation's large rivers including the Mississippi, Colorado, and Columbia in addition to the Rio Grande. In these four basins, the USGS currently (1998) operates a network of 40 NASQAN sites, with an emphasis on quantifying the mass flux for each constituent (the amount of material moving past the site, expressed in tons per day). By applying a consistent flux-based approach in the Rio Grande Basin, the NASQAN program is generating the information needed to identify regional sources for a variety of constituents, including agricultural chemicals and trace elements, in the basin. The effect of the large reservoirs on the Rio Grande can be observed as constituent fluxes are routed downstream. The analysis of constituent fluxes on a basin-wide scale will provide the means to assess the influence of human activity on water-quality conditions in the Rio Grande.
Publisher U. S. Geological Survey
Date 2002
Type Text
Format application/pdf
Digitization Specifications pdf file copied from USGS website http://water.usgs.gov/pubs/fs/fs-076-02/). Uploaded into CONTENTdm version 3.7.
Identifier http://water.usgs.gov/pubs/fs/fs-076-02/
Source Mallard, Gail E.; Hamilton, Pixie A., Monitoring and Assessing our Nation's Water Quality: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 076-02, 7 p.
Language eng
Rights Management Public Domain, Courtesy of the USGS
Holding Institution University of Utah
ARK ark:/87278/s6610z7f
Setname wwdl_er
ID 1145812
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6610z7f
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