How to select river stations for the ECOOP River Station Lists

DRAFT 3 Jan 2008

The ECOOP River Station Catalogue is an overview over all the river discharge stations that are relevant to coastal and shelf seas oceanography in a ROOS region. The ECOOP River Station List contains a subset of the listings in the Catalogue. The selected subset contains the stations that are most important (in some sense) for operational oceanography, i.e., the ones to be pursued first for data access. It is a short-list that, if attained, would cover the basic needs of operational modeling and monitoring; adding other stations would only give marginal benefit.

They may vary by region, but here are some candidates:

1. All the largest rivers emptying into the ROOS region should be included.
2. The stations included should cover at least 80% of the total freshwater discharge to the ROOS region.
3. The stations included represent the discharge to the sea for the river, or the discharge can be parameterized on their data.
4. NRT data access is currently available or reasonably feasible.
5. Useful sets of archived data are available.
6. Other considerations, for example:
   • Rivers that are especially important sources of nutrients, pollutants, etc.
   • Station where there exist formulae for parameterizing other river discharges, total run-off for an area, etc.
   • Rivers that affect particularly sensitive coastal systems / habitats.

• Create a separate xls file for the ECOOP River Station List for each ROOS region. Simply remove all the non-included stations from the ECOOP River Station Catalogue.
• Name the file similar to BOOS_river_list.xls
• Do not change the column structure from the V0 River Station Catalogue xls file.