Compilation of multi-agency water temperature observations for U.S. streams, 1894-2022

This data release collates stream water temperature observations from across the United States from four data sources: The U.S. Geological Survey's National Water Information System (NWIS), Water Quality Portal (WQP), Spatial Hydro-Ecological Decision Systems temperature database (EcoSHEDS), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife's NorWeST stream temperature database. These data were compiled for use in broad scale water temperature models. Observations are included from the contiguous continental US, as well as Alaska, Hawaii, and territories. Temperature monitoring sites were paired to stream segments from the Geospatial Fabric for the National Hydrologic Model. Continuous and discrete data were reduced to daily mean, minimum, and maximum temperatures when more than one measurement was made per site-day. Various quality control checks were conducted including inspecting and converting units, eliminating some duplicate entries, interpreting flags and removing low quality observations, fixing date issues from the WQP, and filtering to expected water temperature ranges. However, we expect data quality issues persist and users should conduct further data quality checks that match the intended use of the data.

This data release contains four core files:

site_metadata.csv contains information about each site at which water temperature observations are reported in this dataset.
national_stream_temp_code.zip contains the R code used to derive the data in this data release.
daily_stream_temperature.zip is a compressed comma separated file of observed water temperatures.
spatial.zip contains the geographic information about each site at which water temperature observations are reported in this dataset.