Hi all,

Despite a few rain events, river flows in late March and the first few days of April were still only about half their seasonal norm. The recent freshwater inputs lowered surface salinity values to less than 2 upstream of station 70. The tip of the salt wedge was still upstream of New Bern and bottom waters of the lower estuary were still greater than 20. The estuary was strongly stratified with vertical salinity differences greater than ~5 and temperature differences greater than ~3 C along most of the estuary. A small zone of very salty and hypoxic water occurred at the very bottom at station 160 and likely resulted from saltwater intrusion from the intercoastal waterway. A subsurface maximum of chlorophyll up to ~ 30 ug/L occurred along the pycnocline from station 50 to 160. No samples were collected at these depths to determine the dominant organisms but previous sampling events found an ongoing bloom of the dinoflagellate, Prorocentrum minimum, which has been commonly observed to form subsurface maxima. Turbidity was < 5 NTU except for at the head of the estuary where river inputs had turbidity of ~ 10 NTU.

Best,

Nathan