NWDTW 2024

The USGS Continuous Water-Quality community maintains a large network of real-time instruments. Throughout the country, the USGS is collecting over 6,000 continuous water-quality datasets at over 2,500 sites and measuring more than 8 water-quality parameters (temperature, specific conductance, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, nitrate, chlorophyll, and Fluorescent Dissolved Organic Matter (fDOM)). Discover what CWQ resources are available for staff, who to contact with questions or suggestions, and what efforts are in progress. This is the 411 on Continuous Water Quality.

Learn more about the USGS Continuous Water-Quality Community at this facilitated networking session. Meet your colleagues, make contacts, and discuss parameters and processes. Ever wish you had more time to ask peers about equipment or a challenge? Great ideas often come by having conversations with people about a shared problem or interest. During this session, employees will get the opportunity to share perspectives with a subset of peers working on the same topics.

This session will cover various aspects of the USGS PFAS sampling strategy.
It will include the development of the strategy and results from preliminary evaluations in cleaning protocols, material selection and techniques.
Target audience: Staff who are collecting discrete water-quality samples for PFAS analysis.

Join us to give input on water-quality graphs!  The project, A National Tool for Graphing and Synthesizing Continuous and Discrete Water-Quality Data, was one of eleven Community of Data Integration (CDI; https://www.usgs.gov/centers/community-for-data-integration-cdi/news/congratulations-2024-cdi-awarded-projects) awarded projects in Fiscal Year 2024. The prototype tool will consist of an interactive user interface for generating advanced visualizations of water-quality parameters to compare with past data, and other parameters and locations. The proof-of-concept will result in a prioritization of graphics and plot types and a reusable tool and codebase. Learn more about the project, the programming progress, and have an opportunity to provide recommendations and suggestions to graphs!

Best practices for beginners in continuous water quality when performing a servicing on a multi-parameter sonde.

Learn more about the completed field evaluation of three commercially available water temperature thermistors (Sutron AquaTemp, Forest Technology Systems (FTS) Digitemps, and Instrumentation Northwest (INW) T1 SDI-12), findings, and future steps. The three temperature thermistors were installed side-by-side at 6 different locations from Water Science Centers that volunteered for the study (locations include Hawaii, New York, Nevada, Indiana, North Carolina, and South Dakota) and operated for 18 months. Data and more information are available at Water Temperature Thermistor Field Test Sharepoint (https://doimspp.sharepoint.com/sites/usgs-Continuous-Water-Quality/SitePages/Water-Temperature-Thermistor-Field-Test.aspx).

Temperature is a principal driver for a variety of in-stream processes including but not limited to biotic activities, chemical reactions, and changes in fluid properties. Additionally, changes in precipitation patterns, snow cover, stream shading, groundwater inputs, and air temperature are driving factors for stream temperatures. The Illinois River Basin supports a variety of uses such as wildlife habitat, power generation, and recreation. Higher in-stream temperatures can lead to harmful algal blooms and other biological and chemical extremes that can cause diminished or toxic habitat for wildlife and limit the human use of streams and rivers within the Illinois River Basin.

As part of the Next Generation Water Observing System (NGWOS) project in the Illinois River Basin paired air and water temperature probes were deployed at 34 sites in 4 major tributaries to the Illinois River and includes monitoring upstream and downstream of 3 reservoirs. This broad spatial distribution using relatively low-cost temperature probes will provide a dataset that could be used to inform numerous research questions across disciplines and agencies.

The objective of this effort is two-fold: (1) to assess the effects of different environmental factors on temperature dynamics in surface water and, (2) to quantify the effect of reservoirs on stream temperature in reaches downstream of a dam. Specifically, what are the major drivers for stream temperatures within the Illinois River Basin and how do these drivers change seasonally or geographically within the basin.

Phosphorus data is an integral part of numerous scientific studies due to its role as a potential limiting nutrient. This presentation will demonstrate some successful ways to achieve real-time phosphorus data and results from testing six commercially available analyzers. Results cover usage, data quality, and common issues collecting real-time phosphorus.

This information is intended for a presentation, rather than a training course.
Multiple techniques are being used in two Colorado reservoir systems (the Three Lakes System near Granby, Colorado, and Blue Mesa Reservoir near Gunnison, Colorado) to monitor Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs). The techniques are continuous monitoring of fluorescence of total chlorophyll and phycocyanin, discrete sampling for chlorophyll-a and algal taxonomy, and construction of satellite (Sentinel 2) models mapping chlorophyll-a concentrations. In the presentation we will compare the results of the different monitoring techniques with the timing of HABs in the reservoirs. The different techniques have different utility in each of the reservoirs and used in combination help track the occurrence of HABs throughout the ice-free season.

The Hach Nitratax has been extensively used by the USGS to collect real-time nitrate concentrations in surface waters. The Nitratax has been replaced by the NT3 series creating uncertainty about data quality and comparability to existing nitrate data. Preliminary results from laboratory and field testing the NT3 series will be shown.

Do you use water-quality monitors and want to learn more about troubleshooting? This course will look at common problems with water-quality monitors and will demonstrate how to identify problems and fix them.

Considerations for deploying and working with the YSI EXO sonde.

As turbidity corrections for field-based fluorescence measurements have been conducted at more sites with elevated turbidities across the nation, evidence of poor correction performance has mounted. In some cases, extreme and erratic values were generated from the corrections. It was determined that the commonly used single parameter exponential fit approximated by Excel does a poor job of correcting for particle interference for many high turbidity samples. An evaluation of turbidity corrections experiments in the laboratory and field samples suggested that updated guidance for turbidity corrections was warranted for high turbidity waters. Here we evaluate different approaches to turbidity corrections for fluorescence measurements and discuss factors affecting the corrections.

Overview of Turbidity basics including theory, calibration and measurement of turbidity.