Extreme rainfall is intensifying globally as the climate continues to warm. Yet how such events affect coastal water quality and potentially influence assessments of water quality improvement remains poorly understood.

Changing climatic conditions that can alter physical characteristics of surface waters may limit the effectiveness of conventional approaches to nutrient management. This study evaluated the competing effects of nutrient loads and changing salinity on chlorophyll-a dynamics in Tampa Bay (Florida, USA).

Degradation of groundwater and surface water quality by excess pollutant loading remains one of the most persistent and costly environmental management challenges in the US. To meet applicable water quality standards and prevent excess pollutants in waterbodies, the Clean Water Act requires that total maximum daily loads (TMDLs), which define the maximum allowable daily pollutant load to a waterbody, are implemented.

Contamination by nutrients, major ions, and metals poses a major threat to global water sustainability. Understanding how these pollutants vary across time and space requires long-term monitoring and robust statistical approaches. Traditional methods, however, often struggle to account for streamflow variability, seasonality, and nonlinear responses.

Estuaries, as transitional zones between land and ocean, exhibit highly nonlinear, cross-scale hydrodynamic processes that present substantial challenges for numerical modeling. Using Chesapeake Bay as an example, we demonstrate a physically based calibration procedure with observation-derived parametrizations, together with a high-resolution unstructured model without bathymetry smoothing.

To effectively manage and protect ocean life and the people who depend on it, we need coordinated, comparable observations of ocean biodiversity. Seagrass cover and composition is an essential ocean variable (EOV) of the Global Ocean Observing System because seagrasses are the foundation of coastal ecosystems worldwide, and support diverse marine life and ecosystem services.

As water-quality challenges intensify, the widely used Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS) method offers an adaptable and practical framework for global water-quality science and management.

Efforts to constrain the negative environmental impacts of excess nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are costly and challenging, due in part to inconsistent reporting of nutrient sources at temporal and spatial scales relevant for local decision making.

Vegetated buffer strips (VBS) are widely used to mitigate agricultural non-point source pollution yet reported retention efficiencies vary considerably across different landscapes. We synthesized 409 observations extracted from 91 peer-reviewed publications to evaluate critical determinants of VBS retention efficiency for agricultural runoff, focusing specifically on total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), and total suspended solids (TSS).

In previous water quality modeling studies in Chesapeake Bay, the severity of summer hypoxia tended to be underestimated in the mid-lower Bay area. The underlying reason has not been well understood. In this study, we test a new hypothesis with respect to the estuary–ocean exchange.