The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has expanded its arsenal of environmental monitoring data trackers with the introduction of the Water Quality Indicators (WQI) tool. The interface enables users to compare millions of data records from water monitoring stations nationwide.

Areas of water quality concern and extreme degradation can be identified using the WQI. Users can visualize where high pollutant readings appear in streams, rivers, lakes and other water bodies. Facilitated by a mapping tool, the WQI makes it easy to explore nutrient and pathogen data and identify the potential sources that are contributing to water quality problems. The system also provides data on facilities including compliance records as well as environmental justice indicators gathered through EJScreen, EPA’s environmental justice screening and mapping tool.

The WQI contains 10 years of surface water monitoring data from the U.S. Water Quality Portal for nutrients (total nitrogen and total phosphorus) and several pathogen parameters (e. coli, enterococci and fecal coliforms). The agency is working to add more pollutants to this project and is developing a short video tutorial to help users get started with the WQI tool. The tutorial will be made available on the ECHO Video Tutorials page once completed.

To contact the author of this article, email shimmelstein@globalspec.com