Climate change is increasing drought severity worldwide. Ocean discharges of municipal wastewater are a target for potable water recycling. However, because potable water recycling would reduce wastewater volume, but would not alter mass nitrogen loading, this practice has the potential to influence spatial patterns in coastal eutrophication. We apply a physical-biogeochemical numerical ocean model to understand the influence of nitrogen management and potable wastewater recycling on net primary productivity (NPP), pH, and oxygen. We model several theoretical management scenarios by combining dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) reductions from 50 to 85% and recycling from 0 to 90%, applied to 19 generalized wastewater outfalls in the Southern California Bight. Under no recycling, NPP, acidification, and oxygen loss decline with DIN reductions, which simulated habitat volume expansion for pelagic calcifiers and aerobic taxa. Recycling scenarios under intermediate DIN reduction show patchier areas of pH and oxygen loss with steeper vertical declines relative to a “no recycling” scenario. These elevated values are diminished under 85% DIN reduction across all recycling levels, suggesting nitrogen management lowers eutrophication risk even with concentrated discharges. These findings represent a novel application of ocean numerical models to investigate the regional effects of outfall management on eutrophication. Additional work is needed to investigate more realistic outfall-specific water recycling and nutrient management scenarios and to contextualize the benefit of these management actions, given accelerating acidification and hypoxia from climate change.

The Southern California Bight (SCB), an eastern boundary upwelling system, is impacted by global warming, acidification and deoxygetation, and receives anthropogenic nutrients from a coastal population of 20 million people. We describe the configuration, forcing, and validation of a realistic, submesoscale resolving ocean model as a tool to investigate coastal eutrophication. This modeling system represents an important achievement because it strikes a balance of capturing the forcing by U.S. Pacific Coast-wide phenomena, while representing the bathymetric features and submesoscale circulation that affect the vertical and horizontal transport of nutrients from natural and human sources. Moreover, the model allows to run simulations at timescales that approach the interannual frequencies of ocean variability, making the grand challenge of disentangling natural variability, climate change, and local anthropogenic forcing a tractable task in the near-term. The model simulation is evaluated against a broad suite of observational data throughout the SCB, showing realistic depiction of mean state and its variability with remote sensing and in situ physical-biogeochemical measurements of state variables and biogeochemical rates. The simulation reproduces the main structure of the seasonal upwelling front, the mean current patterns, the dispersion of plumes, as well as their seasonal variability. It reproduces the mean distributions of key biogeochemical and ecosystem properties. Biogeochemical rates reproduced by the model, such as primary productivity and nitrification, are also consistent with measured rates. Results of this validation exercise demonstrate the utility of fine-scale resolution modeling in support of management decisions on local anthropogenic nutrient discharges to coastal zones.

Coastal nitrogen (N) enrichment is a global environmental problem that can influence acidification, deoxygenation, and subsequent habitat loss in ways that can be synergistic with global climate change impacts. In the Southern California Bight, an eastern boundary upwelling system, modeling of wastewater discharged through ocean outfalls has shown that it effectively doubles N loading to urban coastal waters. However, effects of wastewater outfalls on biogeochemical rates of primary production and respiration, key processes through which coastal acidification and deoxygenation are manifested, have not been directly linked to observed trends in ambient chlorophyll a, oxygen and pH. In this paper, we compare observations of nutrient concentrations and forms, as well as rates of biogeochemical cycling, in areas within treated wastewater effluent plumes compared to areas spatially distant from ocean outfalls where we expected minimum influence of the plume. We document that wastewater nutrient inputs have an immediate, local effect on nutrient stoichiometry, elevating ammonium and nitrite concentrations by a mean of 4 µM and 0.2 µM, respectively, increasing dissolved nitrogen: phosphorus ratios by a mean of 7 and slightly increasing chlorophyll a by a mean of 1 µg L-1 in the upper 60 m of the watercolumn, as well as increasing rates of nitrification within the plume by a mean of 17 nmol L-1 day-1 and increasing δ13C and δ15N of suspended particulate matter, an integrated measure of primary production, by a mean of 1.3 ‰ and 1 ‰, respectively. We did not observe a significant near plume effect on δ18O and δ15N of the dissolved nitrate+nitrite, an indicator of nitrate+nitrite assimilation into the biomass, instantaneous rates of primary production and respiration, or dissolved oxygen concentration, suggesting any potential impact from wastewater on these is moderated by other factors, notably mixing of water masses. These results indicate that a “reference-area” approach, wherein stations within or near the zone of initial dilution (ZID) from the wastewater outfall are compared to stations farther afield (reference areas) to assess contaminant impacts, may be insufficient to document regional scale impacts of nutrients.

Coastal nitrogen (N) enrichment is a global environmental problem that can influence acidification, deoxygenation, and subsequent habitat loss in ways that can be synergistic with global climate change impacts. In the Southern California Bight, an eastern boundary upwelling system, modeling of wastewater discharged through ocean outfalls has shown that it effectively doubles N loading to urban coastal waters. However, effects of wastewater outfalls on biogeochemical rates of primary production and respiration, key processes through which coastal acidification and deoxygenation are manifested, have not been directly linked to observed trends in ambient chlorophyll a, oxygen and pH. In this paper, we compare observations of nutrient concentrations and forms, as well as rates of nitrification, primary production, and respiration, in areas within treated wastewater effluent plumes compared to areas spatially distant from ocean outfalls where we expected minimum influence of the plume. We document that wastewater nutrient inputs have an immediate, local effect on nutrient stoichiometry, elevating ammonium and nitrite concentrations and increasing dissolved nitrogen: phosphorus ratios, as well as increasing rates of nitrification within the plume. We did not observe a near plume effect on nitrate assimilation into the biomass, primary production, chlorophyll a, respiration, or dissolved oxygen concentration, suggesting any potential impact from wastewater on these processes is moderated by offshore factors, notably mixing of water masses. These results indicate that a “reference-area” approach, wherein stations within or near the zone of initial dilution (ZID) from the wastewater outfall are compared to stations farther afield (reference areas) to assess contaminant impacts, is insufficient to document regional scale impacts of nutrients. Understanding of the complex interactions between local, regional, and global drivers on coastal eutrophication requires coupled observational-numerical modeling approaches where numerical models are carefully validated with observed state and rate data to develop effective, evidence-based solutions to coastal eutrophication.