Dataset of terrestrial fluxes of freshwater, nutrients, carbon, and iron to the Southern California bight, U.A.A

Martha Sutula; Minna Ho; Ashmita Sengupta; Fayçal Kessouri; Karen McLaughlin; Kenny McCune; Daniele Bianchi

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2021.106802

Dataset of terrestrial fluxes of freshwater, nutrients, carbon, and iron to the Southern California bight, U.A.A

Data Brief. 2021 Feb 4:35:106802. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2021.106802. eCollection 2021 Apr.

Authors

Martha Sutula¹, Minna Ho¹, Ashmita Sengupta², Fayçal Kessouri¹, Karen McLaughlin¹, Kenny McCune¹, Daniele Bianchi³

Affiliations

¹ Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, 3535 Harbor Blvd., Ste. 110, Costa Mesa, CA, USA.
² CSIRO Land and Water, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
³ Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Abstract

The Southern California Bight (SCB) is an upwelling-dominated, open embayment on the U.S. West Coast and receives discharges of anthropogenically-enhanced freshwater, nutrients, carbon, and other materials. These inputs include direct point sources discharged from wastewater treatment (WWT) plants via ocean outfalls and point, non-point, and natural sources discharged via coastal rivers. We assembled a daily time series over 1971-2017 of discharges from large WWT plants $\geq$ 50 million gallon per day (MGD) and 1997-2017 from small WWT plants and coastal rivers. Constituents include nitrogen, phosphorus, organic carbon, alkalinity, iron, and silica. Data from research studies, several government and non-government agency databases containing discharge monitoring reports, river flow gauges, and other collateral information were compiled to produce this dataset. Predictive models and expert analysis addressed unmonitored sources and data gaps. The time series of terrestrial discharge and fluxes are provided with location of coastal discharge point or tributary. The data are deposited in a repository found in Sutula et al. [1].

Keywords: Coastal exports; Nutrients; Point and non-point sources; River discharge; Terrestrial fluxes; Wastewater discharge.