Procedure for Water Quality Temperature Calculator – Shade-a-lator 6.2

Last updated July 13, 2009

The Shade-a-Lator V. 6.2 is the approved metric for calculating Water Quality: Temperature Credits. Shade-a-Lator is a model, developed by Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality, that calculates thermal load reductions, in kcal/day/ft, from riparian shade restoration projects (http://www.deq.state.or.us/wq/trading/trading.htm). Generally, these projects are linear, extending from several hundred feet to several thousand along a stream. The assessment’s spatial unit is a stream reach whose upstreamdownstream boundaries are defined by the user, and whose lateral boundaries extend outward and perpendicular to the stream to a distance also defined by the user, but typically not more than 150 feet (the usual size of recommended buffers). Within the lateral buffer, the Shade-a-lator samples one set of attributes in 100ft bands and samples dominant vegetation type at 15-foot bands, in both cases moving from the stream out through the buffer.

The Shade-a-Lator currently sits in an Excel Spreadsheet, and data entry instructions are described below.

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