Klamath River Basin Water-Quality Data: Decades of Records, Now Public

Upper Klamath Lake with an algal bloom. R. Shively, USGS.

Why the Klamath's water matters

The Klamath River Basin reaches from the mountains and inland basins of south-central Oregon and northern California to the Pacific, across many climates and ecosystems. Water — how much, and how clean — is vital for farming, towns, power and wildlife.

• Upper Klamath Lake is Oregon's largest freshwater lake (112 square miles), known for seasonal algal blooms.
• The Klamath River has hydropower dams, and the upper basin needs irrigation water for crops and grazing.
• Several endangered fish live in its rivers and lakes, and its marshes are key stops for birds on the Pacific Flyway.

The U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Reclamation and others monitor water quality in Upper Klamath Lake and its watershed — information that serves everyone who manages, works in or lives in the area.

Irrigated fields in the upper Klamath River Basin, Oregon. C. Anderson, USGS.

Rescuing the records

In 2012, the USGS and Reclamation began a multiyear partnership to review more than 20 years of Reclamation's Klamath water-quality data — continuous time series and lab results from water samples — check and correct them, and archive them in the USGS National Water Information System (NWIS), open to the public.

Why long records matter: single measurements of, say, nitrate or dissolved oxygen are useful, but long records reveal trends, seasonal patterns and extremes, and make each measurement more trustworthy. They can answer questions like:

• How has the Klamath River's water temperature changed over time?
• What ammonia levels occurred while a particular fish was spawning?
• Did dissolved oxygen fall to harmful levels during the 2001 drought?

Measurements include water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, nitrate, total suspended solids, alkalinity and total phosphorus, among others.

Hourly water temperature (blue) and dissolved oxygen (orange) at Klamath Straits Drain near Highway 97, May 1 to November 1, 2004, collected by Reclamation — as one rises, the other falls. USGS Data Grapher.

Continuous data

Reclamation began collecting hourly data across the basin in 1990, at sites from the river itself to diversion channels and canals affected by irrigation pumping; a few original sites were still running in 2018. Most measure temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen and specific conductance.

• Instruments changed over the decades, and with no public database, the data sat in local files.
• USGS and Reclamation staff gathered all the documentation — site-visit notes, calibration records and more — and checked every protocol, instrument and value against NWIS standards, correcting or deleting poor data case by case with published USGS methods.

Water samples

From 1998 through 2012, Reclamation collected more than 2,700 water samples from reservoirs, Upper Klamath Lake, groundwater wells and rivers in both states, analyzed for nutrients, chlorophyll-a, biochemical oxygen demand, alkalinity, metals and more.

• The USGS reviewed Reclamation's sampling and quality-assurance protocols and the labs' methods, screened for typos and outliers, and used quality-control data to drop or flag unreliable results.
• What passed went into NWIS, double-checked: more than 20,000 lab analyses, now public and archived.

Water turned green by an algal bloom at a railroad trestle in Lake Ewauna, Oregon. C. Anderson, USGS.

Exploring the data

The USGS built the Klamath River Basin Water-Quality Mapper, a map-based website for the Reclamation data and any other Klamath data in NWIS.

• Start with the "About" link for how-to and project links.
• Search: the Data Exploration Tools (upper left) find specific sites, data types or the latest measurements; or zoom and pan the map. Marker colors show site type and whether it's active.
• Click a site for an information box with links:
• • NWIS — always there — for the continuous or sample data and statistics;
  • the Data Grapher, for continuous records, with custom graphs and tables;
  • an Interactive Plot, for sample data, opening the Discrete Water-Quality Grapher: add or remove parameters, zoom in time, and hover for details.

Have fun exploring.

Endangered Lost River suckers spawning at shoreline springs in Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon. B. Hayes, USGS.

American white pelicans resting on an island in Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, California. USGS.

Sources

Based on Klamath River Basin Water-Quality Data, USGS Fact Sheet 2018-3031 (May 2018), by Cassandra D. Smith, Stewart A. Rounds and Leonard L. Orzol, compiled by Steven Sobieszczyk, U.S. Geological Survey; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The photographs and graph are taken from the fact sheet's PDF; a university photograph of cyanobacteria and a screenshot on a commercial base map are not reproduced.