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Prevailing theory suggests that stream temperature warms asymptotically in a downstream direction, beginning at the temperature of the source in the headwaters and levelling off downstream as it converges to match meteorological conditions. However, there have been few empirical examples of longitudinal patterns of temperature in large rivers due to a paucity of data. We constructed longitudinal thermal profiles (temperature vs distance) for 53 rivers in the Pacific Northwest (USA) using an extensive data set of remotely sensed summertime river temperatures and classified each profile into one of five patterns of downstream warming: asymptotic (increasing then flattening), linear (increasing steadily), uniform (not changing), parabolic (increasing then decreasing), or complex (not fitting other classes). We evaluated (1) how frequently profiles warmed asymptotically downstream as expected, and (2) whether …