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UK lowland river chemistry

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Chemical analysis of stream, river and rainfall samples for lowland rivers in the UK. The data are uncensored and provide a basis for research purposes, and must be viewed in this light. Information on analytical methodologies is available, including detection limits, from which the user can choose how the data might be interpreted. The basins studied were the Tweed, Wear, Humber, Great Ouse and Thames. One tributary (the Teviot) and two main-stem sites were monitored in the Tweed Catchment. One site around two-thirds down the catchment of the River Wear was monitored. Humber Basin Monitoring was undertaken for all the tributaries especially near their downstream limits. The Great Ouse was monitored around half way down the catchment. The Thames catchment was monitored upstream and downstream of sewage inputs to the river, prior and post effluent stripping of phosphorus. This work formed part of a major UK initiative introduced in the early 1990s, the Land Ocean Interaction Study, LOIS, to examine water, chemical and sediment fluxes from the eastern UK rivers to the North Sea. The entire LOIS core monitoring data, including a wider range of determinands, is available from EIDC. As part of this and subsequent work, the initiative was extended to examine a range of catchment basins, from rural to agricultural and industrial/urban impacted ones.
Publication date: 2010-12-31
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Format

Comma-separated values (CSV)

Spatial information

Study area
Spatial representation type
Tabular (text)
Spatial reference system
OSGB 1936 / British National Grid

Temporal information

Temporal extent
1993-09-07    to    2009-10-27

Provenance & quality

Water quality was monitored for eastern UK rivers (Tweed and Humber) as part of the Land Ocean Interaction Study, LOIS, in the early 1990s. Subsequently, the monitoring was transferred to the Wear, Great Ouse and most extensively to the Thames Basin and for the latter, rainfall was also measured . The chemical analysis undertaken within the LOIS programme was undertaken within CEH laboratories at Wallingford (then Institute of Hydrology), Ferry House (Institute of Freshwater Ecology, Windermere) and associated CEH laboratories at York and Stirling. The later analysis was undertaken by the CEH Wallingford Laboratories with phosphorus data for the Wear was measured in collaboration with Professor Brian Whitton at the University of Durham. All data collated by Colin Neal of CEH Wallingford

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Related

Supplemental information

Neal, C., Bowes, M., Jarvie, H. P., Scholefield, P., Leeks, G., Neal, M., Rowland, P., Wickham, H., Harman, S., Armstrong, L., Sleep, D., Lawlor, A. and Davies, C. E. (2012), Lowland river water quality: a new UK data resource for process and environmental management analysis. Hydrol. Process., 26: 949-960.
Colin Neal, Phil Rowland, Paul Scholefield, Colin Vincent, Clive Woods, Darren Sleep, The Ribble/Wyre observatory: Major, minor and trace elements in rivers draining from rural headwaters to the heartlands of the NW England historic industrial base, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 409, Issue 8, 15 March 2011, Pages 1516-1529, ISSN 0048-9697.

Correspondence/contact details

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
 enquiries@ceh.ac.uk

Other contacts

Custodian
NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
 info@eidc.ac.uk
Publisher
NERC Environmental Information Data Centre
 info@eidc.ac.uk

Additional metadata

Topic categories
environment
INSPIRE theme
Environmental Monitoring Facilities
Keywords
Analytical chemistry , Hydrochemistry , United Kingdom , Water quality
Last updated
27 February 2024 16:16