Alterations in the water quality of Galveston Bay on a time scale of decades

This project acquired, digitized and compiled data from 26 historical and ongoing programs, dating back from some parameters, and sorted into two different segmentations: the 40 TNRCC water-quality segments, and 126 'hydrographic segments' whose boundaries reflect the flow and transport patterns within the bay. Each subset of data was subjected to a suite of statistical analyses. The references present at length the distribution of water and sediment quality in the system and proffer hypotheses about the controls governing those distributions. This paper focuses on the alterations in water quality as revealed by a time-trend analysis.