Diurnal Turbidity Patterns and Watershed Attributes for USGS Stations Across the Contiguous United States (2000–2023)

Description This dataset provides diurnal turbidity patterns and associated watershed attribute parameters for USGS stream monitoring stations across the contiguous United States, that collected data over the period of 2000–2023. Initial turbidity data measured at 15-min intervals were obtained from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Information System (NWIS) using dataRetrieval package for R (https://waterdata.usgs.gov/blog/dataretrieval/). Turbidity at these stations was measured on unfiltered water samples at monochrome near infra-red LED light, 780-900 nm, detection angle 90±2.5 degrees and is reported in formazin nephelometric units (FNU). The parameter code in the USGS database is 63680. For each year, only data collected from June through September were considered (hereafter ‘summer’). Then using the combination of frequency domain, statistical, and clustering approaches diurnal turbidity patterns were identified and assigned for each station. Watershed attributes were derived from multiple publicly available databases and include: - Hydrological information - Land use / land cover characteristics - Soil properties - Anthropogenic pressure attributes The dataset is intended to support research on short time-scale turbidity dynamics, watershed hydrology, water quality modeling, and machine learning applications in environmental science.