River-channel topography, grain size, and turbidity records from the Carmel River, California, before, during, and after removal of San Clemente Dam (ver. 2.0, March 2022)

The San Clemente Dam, built in the 1920s on the Carmel River in Monterey County, California, was removed during 2014 and 2015. The dam-removal project was the largest in California to date, and one of the largest in the U.S. This USGS data release presents data collected before, during, and after the removal of the dam. The data were collected to study how the river channel's topographic profiles and sediment distributions changed in response to new sediment supply after dam removal and base-level changes in the former San Clemente reservoir sediment deposit. River-perpendicular topographic profiles and bed-sediment grain size were measured at 56 transects during 4 field surveys spanning 2013 to 2021. The transect site locations were distributed along the river from near the river mouth in Carmel to upstream of the San Clemente reservoir. Repeat high-resolution topographic surveys were conducted at two pools approximately 0.5 and 2.2 kilometers downstream of the dam site between 2014 and 2019. River turbidity and temperature were also measured using a turbidity sensor deployed approximately 2 kilometers downstream of the dam site from December 2014 to July 2017. These data spanned large flood events on the Carmel River during the 2017 winter. Data were collected through a joint effort by scientists from the USGS, California State University Monterey Bay, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This data release supersedes version 1, published in 2017 under DOI 10.5066/F74M93HF.