RESTORE/covESTUSAL, Source code for construction of covariates bound to daily salinity and specific conductance data for purposes of statistical modeling in coastal regions of the Gulf of Mexico, United States

The RESTORE/covESTUSAL software repository contains R language source code useful for the construction of input tables of daily salinity and specific conductance (response variables) from multi-agency monitoring stations and potential predictor variables (covariates) intended for reuse in statistical model construction in coastal regions of the Gulf of Mexico, United States. The source code is expansive and the repository is organizationally deep. The directory structure follows logical organization units concerning data preparation and then binding of covariates (predictor variables) including streamflow, climatology, and celestial positions of the sun and the moon to the daily salinity time series. There are 91 salinity monitoring sites involved, which are aggregated into 15 salinity groups. There are 50 U.S. Geological Survey streamgages involved providing streamflows as surrogates for freshwater inflows. Several distinct scripts are provided to acquire data from original data sources with the repository. The time period represented is controlled by a couple of user settings and extent of original salinity data formally cited in the documentation. As configured, the time period represented encompasses January 1980 through at least December 2021 and more than 1.4 million days of salinity or covariates are represented across the 91 sites. Overall, the workflow is designed as a run-once framework. The repository creates output data structures suitable for statistical investigation and predictive modeling, which are outside the scope of the repository. Finally, the repository is the authoritative data assembly source for a USGS data release formally cited in the documentation and the repository is a companion or sibling software to the RESTORE/makESTUSAL software repository, which is also formally cited in the documentation.