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To assess the consequences of nutrient reduction strategies on water quality under climate change, we investigated the long-term dynamics of dissolved oxygen (DO) and pH in Narragansett Bay (NB), a warming urbanized estuary in Rhode Island, where nitrogen loads have declined due ...

Altered lake hydrology is an emerging, widespread threat as changing climate conditions and increasing human water use place greater pressure on water resources. Dam and land use management can significantly alter lake water-level regimes and flow characteristics, which in turn c...

Argonne is building an intelligent computer application, the Radiological Recovery Logistics Tool (RRLT), to assist the understanding and allocation of resources for a mitigation and recovery effort. RRLT output will be a list of recommended methods and tools to accomplish the sp...

Contamination of surface waters often leads to drinking water contamination, degradation of aquatic biota and their habitat and ultimately the decline of the quality of life for both humans and animals. Pathogen contamination, as determined by bacterial fecal indicators, is the l...

Poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are oxidatively recalcitrant organic synthetic compounds. PFAS are an exceptional group of chemicals that have significant physical characteristics due to the presence of electronegative fluorine. PFAS persists in the environment, bioacc...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Sandia National Laboratories have developed the Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) to quantify resilience of drinking water distribution systems. WNTR is a Python package designed to simulate disaster scenarios and analyze impact...

Drinking water utilities are vulnerable to both human-caused and natural disasters that can impact the system infrastructure and the delivery of potable water to consumers. Resilience analysis can help utilities identify high-risk areas in their system and understand how to bette...

Many aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) delivery systems in aircraft hangars and firefighting vehicles may require thorough cleaning to avoid ongoing environmental impacts from residual per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) within those systems. Though replacement AFFF formula...

Many aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) delivery systems in aircraft hangars and firefighting vehicles may require thorough cleaning to avoid ongoing environmental impacts from residual per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) within those systems. Though replacement AFFF formula...

Onsite wastewater treatment systems are a major source of excess nutrients and co-pollutants in groundwater. The high density of septic systems in New England’s coastal watersheds has degraded the quality of drinking and recreational freshwater resources and led to collapse...

Reduction of total phosphorus (TP) loads has long been a management focus of Chesapeake Bay restoration, but riverine monitoring stations have shown mixed temporal trends. To better understand the regional patterns and drivers of TP trends across the Bay watershed, we compiled an...

This study characterized Bacillus globigii (BG) as a Bacillus anthracis Sterne (BAS) surrogate for wastewater treatment-related studies of UV inactivation, adsorption onto powdered activated carbon (PAC), and bioaerosol emission. The inactivation of BG was faster than that of BAS...

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) were a topic of great interest at the 2018 ASLO Summer Meeting in Victoria, B.C., Canada (Fig. 1). This was no surprise, since HABs may become – and already are in some areas – the greatest water quality threat to public health and aquatic ...

Protein processing operations utilize large volumes of water for hair/hide/feather removal, carcass washing, chilling, trimming and cutting, cooking, cleaning and sanitation, etc. The generated wastewater is typically treated onsite and discharged to municipal wastewater treatmen...

Understanding saltwater intrusion into freshwater coastal wetlands requires long-term historical salinity data, which are often not available in most tidal river systems. This study developed an artificial neural network (ANN) modelling tool to elucidate the relationship between ...

Gulf Ecology Division research ecologist Dr. Deborah Santavy, along with Susan Jackson from the Office of Water’s Office of Science and Technology (OW-OST), presented a webinar on July 16, 2019 to update our NOAA partners in the Coral Reef Conservation Program on the fish a...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global crisis threatening human, animal, and environmental health. The natural environment, specifically water resources, has been recognized as a reservoir and dissemination pathway for AMR; however, urban karst aquifer systems have been overl...

Benthic invertebrates are important trophic links in aquatic food webs and serve as useful bioindicators of environmental conditions because their responses integrate the effects of both water and sediment qualities. However, long-term data sets for benthic invertebrate assemblag...

Consideration of PFAS precursors is necessary in order to close the gap between targeted PFAS analysis and a comprehensive quantification of total PFAS. However, current understanding is limited, and there are many misconceptions and questions: where are PFAS precursors found? Ar...

Phosphorus causes nutrient pollution in lentic water systems, which act as a reservoir of phosphorus since it is stored within the sediments of these waterbodies. The effects of phosphorus pollution include harmful algal bloom events, hypoxia of waterbodies, and impairment of dri...

Historically, communities have used gray infrastructure—systems of gutters, pipes, and tunnels—to move stormwater away from where we live to treatment plants or straight to local water bodies.  The gray infrastructure in many areas is aging, populations are increasing, and its ex...

Streamflow Duration Assessment Methods (SDAMs) are single-visit, field assessment methods for accurately predicting flow duration classes (i.e., ephemeral, intermittent, and perennial) that help implement federal, state, and local water resources programs. The aim of this project...

Should biosolids be contaminated with an intentional malicious release or natural outbreak of Bacillus anthracis spores, a water resource recovery facility (WRRF) may need to consider if their treatment processes can sufficiently inactivate this pathogen. Three methods commonly e...

While SWMM has arguably played a pivotal role in pollution control in collection systems since its introduction, traditional applications using the model have been relatively static. They typically involve calibrating and validating SWMM models with data collected and curated for...

Protein processing operations include animal slaughtering, meat and poultry product production, and/or rendering of byproducts. These facilities utilize large volumes of water for hair/hide/feather removal, carcass washing, chilling, trimming and cutting, cooking, and cleaning/sa...