Water-quality and streamflow datasets used in Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS) models to determine trends in the Nation’s rivers and streams, 1972-2017 (input data)

In 1991, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) began a study of more than 50 major river basins across the Nation as part of the National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) project. One of the major goals of the NAWQA project was to determine how river water quality has changed over time. To support that goal, long-term consistent and comparable monitoring has been conducted by the USGS on streams and rivers throughout the Nation. Outside of the NAWQA project, the USGS and other Federal, State, and local agencies also have collected long-term water-quality data to support their own assessments of changing water quality. In 2017, data from these multiple sources were combined to support one of the most comprehensive assessments to date of water-quality trends in the United States (Oelsner and others., 2017; De Cicco and others, 2017). This data release updates these water quality trends, which ended in 2012, with 5 more years of data and now end in 2017. The three zipped folders below contain the input data used to calibrate the WRTDS trend models for three separate runs on the Yeti supercomputer. The initial run contained the majority of the screened sites and parameters and later runs included additional sites and reruns for sites with corrected data. The output from later runs always superseded earlier runs for any site-parameter combination that was run more than once. The data used in each run is contained in a zipped folder, each of which contains a "data" folder with 2 files and 1 folder with the same beginning part of the filename and same formatting. "WRTDS_2017data...csv" contains discrete water quality data. "WRTDS_2017info...csv" contains site information and model specifications. The folder "flowScaled" contains individual "Q_....csv" files of daily mean streamflow for each trend site. This metadata describes the format of those 3 objects within the zipped folders.