Reference · built on requestCommons signalAir, water & environment

Water Quality Portal

Discrete water quality sample results and monitoring sites from USGS, EPA, and contributing agencies through one REST service.

Request accessPricing ↗

About

The Water Quality Portal is a cooperative service of the USGS, the EPA, and the National Water Quality Monitoring Council. It integrates discrete water quality sample results from USGS NWIS, EPA WQX (STORET), and USDA STEWARDS, contributed by over 400 state, federal, tribal, and local agencies, and serves sites, results, activities, and projects through one set of web services.

An operator on Fibric reads the sites and characteristics that matter to a permit, an intake, or a process and proposes an evidence packet or a hold when a result crosses your limit. You approve the proposal, and the record keeps the result, site, and provider it rests on.

This is a reference listing. It documents what Fibric would read from Water Quality Portal and what it could propose, based on the publisher's published interfaces. Fibric builds it under a managed deployment when you request it; selecting it here installs nothing.

Inputs

  • Monitoring locations from Station/search by countrycode, statecode, countycode, huc, bBox, or a radius with lat, long, and within
  • Sample results from Result/search by characteristicName, characteristicType, sampleMedia, pCode, and startDateLo to startDateHi
  • Sampling events and metrics from Activity/search, ActivityMetric/search, and ResultDetectionQuantitationLimit/search
  • Projects and organizations from Project/search and ProjectMonitoringLocationWeighting/search
  • Period-of-record summaries per site from summary/monitoringLocation/search with summaryYears all, 1, or 5
  • Record counts before a download from a HEAD request's Total-Site-Count and Total-Result-Count headers
  • Valid parameter values from the Codes lookup service at /Codes/{endpointName}

Proposed actions

Read-only. This feed informs operators; it changes nothing.

Proposed actions are target capabilities. Every action runs propose-first and needs a validated deployment and the appropriate permissions.

What you can build

  • Attach upstream samples to a permit file

    Read results for the sites and characteristics above and below an outfall. The operator proposes an evidence packet with each result, its organization, and its activity date.

    With Compliance Evidence

  • Hold a batch when source water shifts

    Read recent results for the characteristic your process depends on at the intake site. When a value exceeds your limit, the operator proposes a quality hold for approval.

    With Quality Hold

  • Flag a result outside the site's record

    Compare a new result against the site's period-of-record summary. When it falls outside the range you set, the operator proposes a notice with the result and its provider.

    With Anomaly Notice

Requirements

  • At least one parameter per query; the services reject an empty search
  • FIPS codes formatted as the docs show, for example statecode US:48 and countycode US:48:453
  • Case-sensitive characteristicName values taken from the Codes lookup service
  • Awareness that USGS-sourced results may be provisional and subject to revision
Authentication
No key. The services accept anonymous GET requests, and POST with a JSON body for queries too long for a URL.

Limits

  • The main services serve WQX 2.2 profiles with no USGS data added after March 11, 2024; newer USGS data sits in the WQX 3.0 beta
  • Site IDs are not harmonized between WQX and NWIS, so one id can appear in both systems
  • Sorting is on by default and slows large responses; downloads over 5 million rows are unsorted by default
  • KML and KMZ are not available from the Result service

Access and pricing

Reference listing. Public feed access is separate from Fibric integration. If you request this feed, your quote covers the build, usage, and support.

Request Water Quality Portal ↗

Questions and answers

How fresh is the data?
WQX (EPA) is refreshed weekly on Thursday evening. NWIS data on the WQX 2.2 services stopped refreshing on March 11, 2024; recent USGS data comes through the WQX 3.0 profiles at waterqualitydata.us/beta.
How do you size a query before pulling it?
Send a HEAD request with the same parameters. The response carries Total-Site-Count and Total-Result-Count headers. Use startDateLo and startDateHi to narrow the range before you download.
Which formats can you request?
mimeType accepts xml, the default in the WQX-Outbound schema, plus csv, tsv, xlsx, geojson, kml, and kmz. Set zip to yes to stream compressed data. The summary monitoring-location profile requires geojson.
Ask about Water Quality Portal

Ask about the capabilities and requirements in this listing.

For project-specific requirements, contact Fibric.

This Commons signal listing is developed, published, and supported by Fibric. It reads public data published by USGS, EPA, and the National Water Quality Monitoring Council (waterqualitydata.us). Upstream agencies and projects are the property of their respective owners, who are not affiliated with Fibric and do not sponsor or endorse this listing. Trademark policy