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Many estuaries experience eutrophication, deoxygenation and warming, with potential impacts on greenhouse gas emissions. However, the response of N₂O production to these changes is poorly constrained. Here we applied nitrogen isotope tracer incubations to measure N₂O production under experimentally manipulated changes in oxygen and temperature in the Chesapeake Bay—the largest estuary in the United States. N₂O production more than doubled from nitrification and increased exponentially from denitrification when O₂was decreased from >20 to <5 micromolar. Raising temperature from 15° to 35°C increased N₂O production 2- to 10-fold. Developing a biogeochemical model by incorporating these responses, N₂O emissions from the Chesapeake Bay were estimated to decrease from 157 to 140 Mg N year⁻¹from 1986 to 2016 and further to 124 Mg N year⁻¹in 2050. Although deoxygenation and warming stimulate N₂O production, the modeled decrease in N₂O emissions, attributed to decreased nutrient inputs, indicates the importance of nutrient management in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, potentially mitigating climate change. 

Estuarine environments are characterized by strong spatial gradients and high temporal variability that are difficult to fully capture with discrete field measurements. This is particularly the case in the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the continental United States. This archive provides a climatological atlas of physical and biogeochemical conditions for the Chesapeake Bay based on numerical model results of 1985-2023. The atlas includes surface and bottom conditions on a fine longitude/latitude grid with a monthly frequency. The environmental variables are stored in a NetCDF file with abundant metadata that can be used in software such as QGIS, Python, R, Matlab or GNU Octave. A 50+ page documentation in PDF format provides additional information on the environmental variables, the numerical model used to generate the climatology, and an evaluation of the model skill over the period of the atlas. The documentation also includes ready-made visualizations for each environmental variable.