Santee Experimental Forest, Watershed 78 (Turkey Creek): streamflow, water chemistry, water table, and weather data

This data publication contains streamflow, water chemistry, water table, and weather data measured at Watershed 78 (WS78) on the Santee Experimental Forest near Huger, South Carolina starting in 1964. WS78 is a 5,240 hectare third-order watershed that was originally gauged in 1963 and monitored until 1984. The stream gauging station was reestablished in late 2004 with real-time gauges/sensors both for rainfall and flow monitoring on SC Highway 41 N near Huger, in cooperation with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the College of Charleston, and the South Carolina Department of Transportation. The current gauging station is approximately 800 meters upstream of the original historic gauging station. Daily streamflow data are provided from 1964-1976 for the historic period. Additional flow (15-minute and daily data starting in 2005) are available from the USGS website (http://waterdata.usgs.gov/sc/nwis/uv?site_no=02172035). Water chemistry data collected at the Watershed 78 gauging station are provided from 2006-2023. Water table data (hourly shallow groundwater levels in centimeters below ground surface and elevation relative to mean sea level) are provided for five monitoring wells from 2006-2019. Daily rainfall totals and average air temperatures collected at the Lotti Road weather station are provided from 1964-2000, and hourly data (including soil temperature) are provided from 2001-2023. Weather data (air and soil temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, solar radiation, etc.) collected at the Turkey Creek weather station are provided as 30-minute averages from 2005-2022. Non-recording manual gauge rainfall data collected from 1964-1984 are also provided for multiple gauges in WS78.
The purpose of Watershed 78 (Turkey Creek) when established in 1964 was to expand the scale at which research on the effects of watershed size on hydrologic relationships could be conducted on the Santee Experimental Forest. Monitoring on this watershed was discontinued in 1984 but resumed again in December 2004 as the USDA Forest Service initiated a multi-collaborative, multi-faceted research effort on the watershed. As part of this initiative, the USGS (with support from the USDA Forest Service and the College of Charleston) installed instruments to monitor stage (for flow estimation) and rainfall at the watershed outlet at the Highway 41 N bridge over Turkey Creek near Huger, SC in December 2004. At this time the USGS also began developing stage-discharge relationships for the Turkey Creek gauging station. The USDA Forest Service began monitoring water quality at the watershed outlet in March 2006 to coincide with ongoing monitoring of stream flow and climatic parameters.
Data from 1964-2020 were published on 04/14/2024. On 08/12/2024 we added: WS78 water quality data from 2021-2023, Lotti weather data from 2021-2023, and Turkey Creek weather data from 2021-2022. Minor metadata updates were also made.