Flood water quality and marine sediment and nutrient loads from the Tully and Murray catchments in north Queensland, Australia
Jim Wallace A B , Lachlan Stewart A , Aaron Hawdon A , Rex Keen A , Fazlul Karim A and Joseph Kemei A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A CSIRO Land and Water, Townsville, Qld 4814, Australia.
B Corresponding author. Email: jim.wallace@csiro.au
Marine and Freshwater Research 60(11) 1123-1131 https://doi.org/10.1071/MF08356
Submitted: 19 December 2008 Accepted: 22 May 2009 Published: 17 November 2009
Abstract
Current estimates of sediment and nutrient loads from the Tully–Murray floodplain to the Great Barrier Reef lagoon are updated by taking explicit account of flood events. New estimates of flood discharge that include over-bank flows are combined with direct measurements of sediment and nutrient concentrations in flood waters to calculate the loads of sediment and nutrient delivered to the ocean during 13 floods that occurred between 2006 and 2008. Although absolute concentrations of sediment and nutrient were quite low, the large volume of water discharged during floods means that they make a large contribution (30–50%) to the marine load. By not accounting for flood flows correctly, previous estimates of the annual average discharge are 15% too low and annual loads of nitrogen and phosphorus are 47% and 32% too low respectively. However, because sediments may be source-limited, accounting for flood flows simply dilutes their concentration and the resulting annual average load is similar to that previously estimated. Flood waters also carry more dissolved organic nitrogen than dissolved inorganic nitrogen and this is the opposite of their concentrations in river water. Consequently, dissolved organic nitrogen loads to the ocean may be around twice those previously estimated from riverine data.
Acknowledgements
We thank the Australian Government Department of the Environment and Water Resources, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA), TERRAIN Natural Resource Management Ltd, the RRRC Marine and Tropical Science Research facility (MTSRF) and the CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country for co-funding support for this study. We are also grateful for the assistance of the Australian Centre for Tropical Freshwater Research (ACTFR) for processing our water quality. We also acknowledge the supply of rainfall data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and river flow data from the Department of Natural Resources and Water (DNRM). We are grateful to CSIRO colleagues and the external reviewers for their very helpful comments on the draft manuscript.
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