SMC completes intercalibration for stream monitoring program after 2-year hiatus

The Southern California Stormwater Monitoring Coalition (SMC) has completed an in-person field intercalibration exercise for its Regional Watershed Monitoring Program that demonstrated that program participants have been able to maintain a high degree of comparability and standardization despite a two-year intercalibration hiatus.

The day-long SMC intercalibration exercise, held in March and facilitated by SCCWRP, was the first opportunity since 2019 for field crews to come together to ensure that they are generating comparable, high-quality data sets for the SMC’s regional stream monitoring program.

The annual intercalibration was canceled in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, although monitoring program participants continued to collect field data on their own and SCCWRP continued to audit the performance of field crews individually.

The SMC Regional Watershed Monitoring Program initiated its third five-year monitoring cycle last year. Among the priorities for this monitoring cycle is a stream causal assessment investigation that will examine specifically why some SMC stream sites with degraded water quality score low using bioassessment-based stream scoring tools.