Wastewater disposal often has deleterious impacts on the receiving environment. Low dissolved oxygen levels are particularly concerning. Here, we investigate the impacts on dissolved oxygen and carbon chemistry of screened municipal wastewater in the marine waters off Victoria, Canada. We analyzed data from undersea moorings, ship-based monitoring, and remotely-operated vehicle video. We used these observations to construct a two-layer model of the nearfield receiving environment.
We reconstruct the evolution of ocean acidification in the California Current System (CalCS) from 1979 through 2012 using hindcast simulations with an eddy-resolving ocean biogeochemical model forced with observation-based variations of wind and fluxes of heat and freshwater. We find that domain-wide pH and \$\\\backslashrm\\backslashOmega \\\_\\backslashmathrm\arag\\\$ in the top 60 m of the water column decreased significantly over these three decades by about −0.02 decade−1 and −0.12 decade−1, respectively.