Water Resources of Arizona

Welcome to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Web page for the water resources of Arizona; this is your direct link to all kinds of water-resource information. Here you'll find information on Arizona's rivers and streams. You'll also find information about groundwater, water quality, and many other topics.

• USGS Southern Arizona Noon Seminar Series Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm (unless noted otherwise) Location: Room 253, Dennis Deconcini Environment and Natural Resources Building, University of Arizona
  Date	Speaker	Seminar Title
  January 26, 2017	James Callegary USGS Arizona Water Science Center	Post-Wildfire Potential for Carbon and Nitrogen Retention and Sequestration in the Southwestern United States in Restored Ephemeral and Intermittent Stream Channels (abstract)
  February 9 (TENTATIVE)	Evan Canfield	Urban Runoff and Watershed Management

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  Click to view larger map image

  Flood Warning Sites for the Community of Cedar Creek, Arizona

  The Arizona Water Science Center installed a network of rain gages and stream gages in response to the Cedar Fire to provide flood warning for the community of Cedar Creek, Arizona.
  
  
  Links to Cedar Fire Flood warning stream and precipitation stations

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  Grand Canyon High Flow Monitoring

  Video: The USGS monitors sediment loads during Grand Canyon's beach-building high flow releases.

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  Estimated long-term cumulative storage depletion fraction in 31 areas and aquifers within the United States.

  Depletion and Capture: Revisiting The Source of Water Derived from Wells

  Lenny Konikow of the USGS National Research Program and Stan Leake of the Arizona Water Science Center have a new article entitled "Depletion and Capture: Revisiting The Source of Water Derived from Wells," published in a current issue of the journal Groundwater. Sources of water to pumped wells include storage depletion and capture of water entering or leaving aquifers. The authors discuss how depletion and capture are linked through time and how limited available capture can affect the sources of water to pumped wells. In the figure shown here, the authors indicate estimated ratios of storage depletion to volume of groundwater pumped for 31 areas and aquifers in the United States. The article can be accessed at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gwat.12204/pdf

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  Maps of the damping factor at the
  water table in Central Valley, California, computed by the screening tool.
  Click to view larger image....

  New tool for improving simulation of recharge in groundwater models

  Recharge of aquifers by the infiltration of surface water varies over time, but at widely different rates. In some cases, groundwater models can treat recharge as a steady process (not varying over time), which makes the model simpler and more efficient to run. In other cases, variation in recharge over time is an important process, and should be included in a groundwater model to improve its accuracy. A new screening tool developed at the Arizona Water Science Center can simplify groundwater models by delineating areas where recharge can be treated as steady state. The screening tool determines a damping depth that is based on an analytical solution for the damping of sinusoidal infiltration variations in homogeneous soils in the vadose zone. Groundwater recharge may be considered steady where the damping depth is above the depth of the water table. A recent paper in Vadose Zone Journal presents nomograms for predicting the damping depth for clay and sandy soils. The screening tool was applied to Central Valley, California and found areas where monthly, seasonal, or annual variations in infiltration may be damped to steady rates. A MATLAB script, DAMP, is available for computing the damping factor for any soil and any sinusoidal flux variation. A discussion of the paper and its implications for groundwater modeling is a featured story by the Soil Science Society of America.

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  USGS Streamgaging in the 1920s

  While the US Geological Survey (USGS) streamgage located at the Colorado River in Grand Canyon was not one of the first USGS streamgages established in Arizona, it was certainly one of the most remote and difficult-to-access gages. Located within the ancient Vishnu Schist in the inner gorge of Grand Canyon, the first permanent gage was constructed in 1922. One of the first gaging station operators at the site was Glenton Godfrey Sykes.

  Read stories about streamgaging on the Colorado River in the 1920s as Glenton Sykes wrote them in his unpublished autobiography, Scraps From the Past.