The sources in this chapter provide data on all forms of water: surface waters such as rivers and lakes, groundwater, and oceans. The primary focus is on data about water quality, such as chemical contaminants or algae blooms, although several of the sources also provide more general data on water.
Major Sources: United States
U.S. Geological Survey (U.S. Department of the Interior)
Hydrological data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is available from the National Water Information System (http://waterdata.usgs.gov), which distributes data collected from more than one million streams, wells, and other sites in the United States. The depth of water in the stream, river, or other body of water is available for many locations, as is data on the groundwater level for wells; data on the volume of water flowing through streams is also widely available. Some sites also report such information as temperature and turbidity of the water and level of various chemicals in the water, as well as meteorological data for the location. Data is automatically recorded one to four times per hour, then transmitted to the USGS every few hours, so up-to-date information is available through the site. This raw data is available for 2007 to present; daily, monthly, and annual summaries are available for a much longer time period, with some sites going back to the early nineteenth century.
Environmental Protection Agency
Two Environmental Protection Agency data sets that deal specifically with water quality are STORET (www.epa.gov/storet/dbtop.html) and Watershed Assessment, Tracking and Environmental Results (WATERS, http://water.epa.gov/scitech/datait/tools/waters/index.cfm). STORET gathers and disseminates the results of water quality assessments collected by various government and nongovernmental agencies. Different types of water quality assessments are available, including not only chemical analyses of water itself but analyses of contaminants in fish living in that water, data about the plants, animals and microbes living in the water, and more. WATERS provides data about waters that are considered to be impaired because of problems such as algae overgrowth, pollutants such as mercury or PCBs, or microbes such as E. coli.
There are several different ways to access data from these two systems. One, the Surf Your Watershed tool (http://cfpub.epa.gov/surf/locate/index.cfm), allows users to identify quickly the watersheds in a given geographic area, access the STORET monitoring data gathered in a selected watershed, and view the WATERS water quality assessment report, which contains data on the amount of water (miles of streams and rivers, or acres of reservoirs and lakes) and the specific bodies of water in a selected watershed that are considered to be impaired for each reason. Another, the MyWATERS Mapper (http://watersgeo.epa.gov/mwm/), allows users to browse, visualize, and download water quality data on an interactive map. Data from WATERS is also available in GIS-compatible formats (http://water.epa.gov/scitech/datait/tools/waters/).
Major Sources: World
UN-Water (United Nations)
UN-Water was formed in 1993 by the United Nations to coordinate water-related activities carried out by the organizations within the UN system. Its website (www.unwater.org) provides quick access to freshwater-related data disseminated by several UN agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization’s AQUASTAT database (www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/main/index.stm), which contains information about water resources and irrigation; and the World Health Organization/United Nations Children’s Fund Joint Monitoring Program for Water Supply and Sanitation (www.wssinfo.org), which tracks the number of people worldwide who do and do not have access to improved drinking water and sanitation facilities. In addition to linking to other sources for data, UN-Water also maintains a collection of water-related statistics on its own site as well as an interactive Key Water Indicators Portal (www.unwater.org/statistics_KWIP.html) that allows users to visualize eight water indicators on a map.
Water Information System for Europe
The Water Information System for Europe (WISE, http://water.europa.eu) is a joint project of four European agencies. WISE data resources are contained on the sites of two of these agencies. Eurostat, the general statistical agency of the European Union (see chapter 2), provides national and subnational data on water usage, water resources, and wastewater treatment. More data is available from the European Environment Agency (www.eea.europa.eu/themes/water/dc), which disseminates data sets primarily focused on measures of water quality, on releases of various chemicals into water, and on wastewater treatment. GIS files of water-related data, including locations of rivers and their watersheds, are also available from the European Environment Agency.
Minor Sources
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (U.S. Department of Commerce)
Most of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data source are covered in chapter 6, but its oceanographic data sets deserve a separate mention here. Thousands of NOAA data sets covering topics such as water temperature, salinity, oxygen levels, water depth, and algal blooms are available both through Data.gov (the overarching U.S. government data portal, covered in chapter 2) and through the website of NOAA’s National Oceanographic Data Center (www.nodc.noaa.gov/index.html). Date ranges for the different types of data vary widely, but some information is available as far back as 1773.
Institute for Environment and Sustainability (European Commission)
The Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) maintains two portals with oceanographic data: the Environmental Marine Information System (EMIS, http://emis.jrc.ec.europa.eu), which focuses on the waters surrounding the European continent, and the Global Marine Information System (GMIS, http://gmis.jrc.ec.europa.eu), which covers the entire world. Both sites have an interactive mapping interface that allows users not only to visualize the data but also to perform some online analyses of it. Similar data is provided through these two sites, although a few more variables and a greater resolution are available in EMIS. Both sites have time-series data, with time series of several decades available for some variables.