Engineering Commons^™

Data From: Warming Of The Columbia River, 1853 To 2018, Malia Hanae Scott, Stefan Talke, David Jay, Heida Diefenderfer

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Datasets

Water temperature is a critical ecological indicator; however, few studies have statistically modeled century-scale trends in riverine or estuarine water temperature, or their cause. Here, we recover, digitize, and analyze archival temperature measurements from the 1850s onward to investigate how and why water temperatures in the lower Columbia River are changing. To infill data gaps and explore changes, we develop regression models of daily historical Columbia River water temperature using time-lagged river flow and air temperature as the independent variables. Models were developed for 3 time periods (mid-19 th , mid-20 th , and early 21 st century), using archival …