The Water Quality Portal (now with Map!)
August 21, 2013 1:18 PM Subscribe
The Water Quality Portal (now with Map!)
The Water Quality Portal is a collaborative project between the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make it easier to share water quality data. Data are harvested from the USGS NWIS database and the EPA STORET database, mapped to the WQX standard, and served back out again. There is information about over 2 million sites and over 200 million sample results. The most significant feature that we have added this year (and why I am posting this) is a mapping tool that allows users to map up to 250,000 sites based on any of the 15 different criteria to narrow a search.
Everything except the underlying database (which is Oracle) is based on open source tools and protocols.
Data are also available through an API, documented here
Future work will involve adding additional data sources and semantically linking water quality data to other relevant tools, such as methods and publications databases.
The Water Quality Portal is a collaborative project between the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make it easier to share water quality data. Data are harvested from the USGS NWIS database and the EPA STORET database, mapped to the WQX standard, and served back out again. There is information about over 2 million sites and over 200 million sample results. The most significant feature that we have added this year (and why I am posting this) is a mapping tool that allows users to map up to 250,000 sites based on any of the 15 different criteria to narrow a search.
Everything except the underlying database (which is Oracle) is based on open source tools and protocols.
Data are also available through an API, documented here
Future work will involve adding additional data sources and semantically linking water quality data to other relevant tools, such as methods and publications databases.
Role: Technical team lead / scrum master
As it turns out, there is the National Groundwater Monitoring Network tool, also developed in my office! We are still working with cooperators to bring more data into the network, but the backbone is there, and there are a number of monitoring wells in CA.
As for the lack of a .gov URL, that was thanks to a poorly-interpreted directive from on high, that basically meant that for a chunk of time, no new .gov urls could be created, and so there we are with a .us instead.
posted by rockindata at 7:51 AM on August 22, 2013
As for the lack of a .gov URL, that was thanks to a poorly-interpreted directive from on high, that basically meant that for a chunk of time, no new .gov urls could be created, and so there we are with a .us instead.
posted by rockindata at 7:51 AM on August 22, 2013
We just deployed a shiny new interface for the Water Quality Portal, so now you can do the things you could do before on any device, among other things.
posted by rockindata at 7:28 PM on March 18, 2014
posted by rockindata at 7:28 PM on March 18, 2014
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My county (San Luis Obispo, CA US:06,079;) mails to all residential addresses an annual Water Quality Report which is a little hard for me to decipher, so probably goes over the heads or straight into the wastebasket for most. Time to find it and do some data comparison!
Maybe more people 'round here will be interested in water issues with the news of the "plunge" in groundwater levels in the main agricultural part of the county (which is still over 25 miles away from me). Got any plans for a Groundwater Level database? Make a proposal, scrum master!
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:46 PM on August 21, 2013