A 14-Year Multi-sites and High-Frequency Monitoring of Salinity in the Tidal Garonne River (S-W France) Reveals Marked Inter-annual Variability in Marine Intrusion

Abstract

With its 625 km², the Gironde estuary (S-W France) is one of the largest European estuaries. The tidal Garonne and Dordogne Rivers, whose confluence is located at about 75 km from the mouth, form its fluvial section. The Tidal Garonne River (TGR) represents about 2/3 of the freshwater inputs to the Gironde. For a long time it has been accepted the limit of saline intrusion, identified by a salinity higher than 0.5, was nearly at the confluence. In the last decades, there has been a significant decrease of the annual mean TGR discharge, likely to influence marine intrusion. It is often difficult to establish changes in marine intrusion in estuaries due to the limited available data set. This work presents the interest of a multi-sites and high frequency monitoring system, called MAGEST, that records since 2004 four physico-chemical parameters, including salinity, to establish a reference database of water-quality of this large fluvio-estuarine system, in order to address current and future water-quality issues, including saline intrusion. This work presents in details the 14-year time series of salinity along the Garonne-Gironde continuum. Not surprisingly, there are large differences among the instrumented stations depending on their localization. High-frequency salinity chronic at Bordeaux is used to assess the occurrence of saline intrusion in the Tidal Garonne River, revealing marked inter-annual variability in marine intrusion depending of fluvial discharge. The ongoing regional changes suggest an increase of salinity in TGR in the next decades.