Daily stream temperature predictions for free-flowing streams in the Pacific Northwest, USA

Jared E Siegel, Aimee H Fullerton, Alyssa M FitzGerald, Damon Holzer and Chris E Jordan

PLOS Water, 2023, vol. 2, issue 8, 1-27

Abstract: Supporting sustainable lotic ecosystems and thermal habitats requires estimates of stream temperature that are high in scope and resolution across space and time. We combined and enhanced elements of existing stream temperature models to produce a new statistical model to address this need. Contrasting with previous models that estimated coarser metrics such as monthly or seasonal stream temperature or focused on individual watersheds, we modeled daily stream temperature across the entire calendar year for a broad geographic region. This model reflects mechanistic processes using publicly available climate and landscape covariates in a Generalized Additive Model framework. We allowed covariates to interact while accounting for nonlinear relationships between temporal and spatial covariates to better capture seasonal patterns. To represent variation in sensitivity to climate, we used a moving average of antecedent air temperatures over a variable duration linked to area-standardized streamflow. The moving average window size was longer for reaches having snow-dominated hydrology, especially at higher flows, whereas window size was relatively constant and low for reaches having rain-dominated hydrology. Our model’s ability to capture the temporally-variable impact of snowmelt improved its capacity to predict stream temperature across diverse geography for multiple years. We fit the model to stream temperatures from 1993–2013 and predicted daily stream temperatures for ~261,200 free-flowing stream reaches across the Pacific Northwest USA from 1990–2021. Our daily model fit well (RMSE = 1.76; MAE = 1.32°C). Cross-validation suggested that the model produced useful predictions at unsampled locations across diverse landscapes and climate conditions. These stream temperature predictions will be useful to natural resource practitioners for effective conservation planning in lotic ecosystems and for managing species such as Pacific salmon. Our approach is straightforward and can be adapted to new spatial regions, time periods, or scenarios such as the anticipated decline in snowmelt with climate change.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/water/article?id=10.1371/journal.pwat.0000119 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/water/article/file?id=10 ... 00119&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pwat00:0000119

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000119

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Water from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by water ().