Timescales and Magnitude of Water Quality Change in Three Texas Estuaries Induced by Passage of Hurricane Harvey
- PDF / 1,481,432 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 113 Downloads / 175 Views
Timescales and Magnitude of Water Quality Change in Three Texas Estuaries Induced by Passage of Hurricane Harvey Lily M. Walker 1 & Paul A. Montagna 1 & Xinping Hu 2 & Michael S. Wetz 1 Received: 3 April 2020 / Revised: 23 September 2020 / Accepted: 2 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Tropical cyclones represent a substantial disturbance to water quality in coastal ecosystems via storm surge, winds, and flooding. However, evidence to date suggests that the impacts of tropical cyclones on water quality are generally short-lived (days-months) and that the magnitude of the disturbance is related to proximity to storm track. Discrete and continuous water samples were collected in three Texas estuaries before and after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017. Of the three estuaries, the Guadalupe Estuary and its watershed received the highest rainfall totals and wind speeds. An ephemeral increase in salinity was observed (mean of 9.8 on 24 August 2017 to a peak of 32.1 on 26 August 2017) due to storm surge and was followed by a rapid decrease to < 1 as floodwaters reached the estuary. Salinity returned to pre-storm levels within 1 month. During the low salinity period, bottom water hypoxia developed and lasted for 9 days. In all three estuaries, there was an increase in inorganic nutrients postHarvey, but the nutrients largely returned to pre-storm baseline levels by winter. The lack of long-term water quality impacts from Harvey despite its severity corroborates previous findings that estuarine water quality tends to return to baseline conditions within days to a few months after storm passage. Keywords Hurricane Harvey . Biogeochemistry . Water quality . Texas . Estuaries . Flood
Introduction Tropical cyclones can lead to dramatic short-term changes in estuarine water quality (Wetz and Yoskowitz 2013). For example, tropical cyclone-driven flooding can rapidly reduce salinity and lead to strong stratification. In addition, it can deliver copious amounts of allochthonous organic matter and nutrients to the estuary (Paerl et al. 1998). Respiration of the allochthonous organic matter as well as organic matter from any phytoplankton blooms that develop can cause bottom water hypoxia-anoxia (Paerl et al. 1998, 2001; Mallin Communicated by Arnoldo Valle-Levinson Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-020-00846-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Lily M. Walker [email protected] 1
Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, TX, USA
2
Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, TX, USA
et al. 1999; Peierls et al. 2003; Tomasko et al. 2006). Despite the potential severe impact of tropical cyclones, most studies have shown that estuarine water quality conditions typically return to pre-storm conditions in 1 month or less (Valiela et al. 1998; Hagy et al. 2006; Tomasko et al. 200
Data Loading...
