A new Water Quality Portal [waterqualitydata.us] was released by agencies of the U.S. federal government on May 1.
The Water Quality Portal (WQP) is a cooperative service sponsored by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Water Quality Monitoring Council (NWQMC) that integrates publicly available water quality data from the USGS National Water Information System (NWIS) and the EPA STOrage and RETrieval (STORET) Data Warehouse.
The EPA water quality data originate from the STORET Data Warehouse, which is the EPA’s repository of water quality monitoring data collected by water resource management groups across the country. Organizations, including states, tribes, watershed groups, other federal agencies, volunteer groups and universities, submit data to the STORET Warehouse in order to make their data publicly accessible. For more information about STORET, see the STORET Home Page.
The USGS water quality data originate from the NWISWeb Database. The database contains current and historical water data from more than 1.5 million sites across the nation and is used by state and local governments, public and private utilities, private citizens, and other federal agencies involved with managing our water resources. For more information on what data are available and how NWIS data are mapped to the Water Quality Exchange (WQX) format, visit NWIS Water Quality Web Services.
More from the USGS:
The Portal provides a single, user-friendly web interface showing where water quality information is available from federal, state, tribal and other water partners. It reduces the burden to data users searching, compiling, and formatting water monitoring data for analysis, and provides scientists, policy-makers, and the public with a single web interface to query data stored in STORET and NWIS.
Data users can choose from a variety of filters including geographic and sample parameters, to narrow down the dataset by state, county, organization, watershed, and sites of interest. Downloaded data can be served out in comma-separated, tab-separated, MS Excel, Keyhole Markup Language (KML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) file formats.
The Portal utilizes the common nomenclature known as the Water Quality Exchange (WQX) to retrieve data from NWIS and STORET and publish it in a consistent format. The Portal is designed to support additional data sources that are integrated with the WQX template. EPA offers a web-based data entry tool called WQX-Web that enables data owners to upload their data for use by the Portal.
Future enhancements to the portal include the development of the Portal’s interface, web services, and compatibility with popular mapping tools.
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