Attributes for NHDPlus Version 2.1 Reach Catchments and Modified Routed Upstream Watersheds for the Conterminous United States: STATSGO Soil Characteristics, Soil Salinity

This tabular data set represents the STATSGO soil layer attribute, salinity, compiled for two spatial components of the NHDPlus version 2 data suite (NHDPlusv2) for the conterminous United States; 1) individual reach catchments and 2) reach catchments accumulated upstream through the river network. The source data is found in the LAYER table from the "STATSGO soil characteristics for the conterminous United States" produced by the United States Geological Survey (Wolock, 1997). The ability of a water sample to conduct electricity is used to determine its salt content and is reported as milliohms per centimeter (mohms/cm). This dataset can be linked to the NHDPlus version 2 data suite by the unique identifier COMID. Reach catchment information characterizes data at the local scale. Reach catchments accumulated upstream through the river network characterizes cumulative upstream conditions. Network-accumulated values are computed using two methods, 1) divergence-routed and 2) total cumulative drainage area. Both approaches use a modified routing database to navigate the NHDPlus reach network to aggregate (accumulate) the metrics derived from the reach catchment scale. (Schwarz and Wieczorek, 2016).