Data From: Warming of the Willamette River, 1850–Present: The Effects of Climate Change and Direct Human Interventions
Document Type
Dataset
Publication Date
9-2022
Subjects
Water Temperature, Climatic Changes -- Effect of human beings on, Anthropogenic Effects, River regulation
Abstract
Using archival research methods, we found and combined data from multiple sources to produce a unique, 140 year record of daily water temperature (Tw) in the lower Willamette River, Oregon (1881–1890, 1941–present). Additional daily weather and river flow records from the 1850s onwards are used to develop and validate a statistical regression model of Tw for 1850–2020. The model simulates the time-lagged response of Tw to air temperature and river flow, and is calibrated for three distinct time periods: the late 19th, mid 20th, and early 21st centuries. Results show that Tw has trended upwards at ~1.1 °C /century since the mid-19th century, with the largest shift in January/February (1.3 °C /century) and the smallest in May/June (~ 0.8 °C /century). The duration that the river exceeds the ecologically important threshold of 20 °C has increased by ~20 days since the 1800s, to ~60 d yr-1. Moreover, cold water days below 2 °C have virtually disappeared, and the river no longer freezes. Since ~1900, changes are primarily correlated with increases in air temperature (Tw increase of 0.81 ±0.25 °C) but also occur due to increased reservoir capacity, altered land use and river morphology, and other anthropogenic changes (0.34 ±0.12 °C). Managed release of water influences Tw seasonally, with an average reduction of 0.27 °C and 0.56 °C estimated for August and September. System changes have decreased daily variability (σ) by 0.44 °C, increased thermal memory, and reduced interannual variability. These system changes fundamentally alter the response of Tw to climate change, posing additional stressors on fauna.
Rights
© Author(s) 2022.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
DOI
10.15760/cee-data.06
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39806
Recommended Citation
Talke, Stefan; Jay, David; and Diefenderfer, Heida, "Data From: Warming of the Willamette River, 1850–Present: The Effects of Climate Change and Direct Human Interventions" (2022). Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Datasets. 6.
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39806
Description
The data supports a manuscript to be published in Hydrological Earth System Sciences, the pre-print of which is available from EGUsphere:
Talke, S. A., Jay, D. A., and Diefenderfer, H. L.: Warming of the Willamette River, 1850–present: the effects of climate change and direct human interventions, EGUsphere [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2022-793, 2022.
The pre-print is also available in PDXScholar:
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39805