Abstract
Water quality data collection, storage, and access is a difficult task and significant work has gone into methods to store and disseminate these data. We present a tool to disseminate research in a simple method that does not replace but extends and leverages these tools. The tool is not geo-graphically limited and works with any spatially-referenced data. In most regions, government agencies maintain central repositories for water quality data. In the United States, the federal government maintains two systems to fill that role for hydrological data: the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Information System (NWIS) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Storage and Retrieval System (STORET), since superseded by the Water Quality Portal (WQP). The Consortium of the Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) has developed the Hydrologic Information System (HIS) to standardize the search and discovery of these data as well as other observational time series datasets. Additionally, CUAHSI developed and maintains HydroShare.org (5 May 2021) as a web portal for researchers to store and share hydrology data in a variety of formats including spatial geographic information system data. We present the Tethys Platform based Water Quality Data Viewer (WQDV) web application that uses these systems to provide researchers and local monitoring organizations with a simple method to archive, view, analyze, and distribute water quality data. WQDV provides an archive for non-official or preliminary research data and access to those data that have been collected but need to be distributed prior to review or inclusion in the state database. WQDV can also accept subsets of data downloaded from other sources, such as the EPA WQP. WQDV helps users understand what local data are available and how they relate to the data in larger databases. WQDV presents data in spatial (maps) and temporal (time series graphs) forms to help the users analyze and potentially screen the data sources before export for additional analysis. WQDV provides a convenient method for interim data to be widely disseminated and easily accessible in the context of a subset of official data. We present WQDV using a case study of data from Utah Lake, Utah, United States of America.
Highlights
Researchers note that the Water Quality Portal (WQP) system is needed because, while systems such as National Water Information System (NWIS), STORET, and Consortium of the Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS), CUAHSI-HIS systems provide high-quality hydrologic data such as streamflow, water quality data are often collected by small, diverse monitoring organizations and have a broad range of access ranging from web services to spreadsheet files only available on direct request, making aggregation and dissemination difficult [1]
Our work extends this concept of distributed access to water quality data to provide a small web-based application that provides tools for archiving, accessing, and disseminating water quality data created by local research or monitoring groups
Managers, and the concerned public with better access to the water quality data collected by our research group, we developed an open-source application called Water Quality Data Viewer (WQDV)
Summary
Storage, and access are difficult tasks because of the large number of data types, field sample types, laboratory analysis methods, and other critical information such as detection limits or other quality control information [1]. Researchers note that the WQP system is needed because, while systems such as NWIS, STORET, and Consortium of the Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS), CUAHSI-HIS systems provide high-quality hydrologic data such as streamflow, water quality data are often collected by small, diverse monitoring organizations and have a broad range of access ranging from web services to spreadsheet files only available on direct request, making aggregation and dissemination difficult [1]. CUAHSI-HIS was developed following a distributed web services approach with well described metadata to support modeling and data access, description, and storage [4,13,14] Our work extends this concept of distributed access to water quality data to provide a small web-based application that provides tools for archiving, accessing, and disseminating water quality data created by local research or monitoring groups. We expect that many data that are entered into our system will at some point be submitted to larger, more comprehensive systems
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