Water Quality Monitoring and Reporting Services
We live in an information-rich society whose demands for timely and accurate data touch every aspect of our lives – from the number of steps we take a day to the complex algorithms that provide us with location-specific weather forecasts up to the minute. As demands for data transparency and access focus increasingly on public health and individual wellness, the importance of high-quality environmental and public health data, too, grows. As easy as it is to check for rain in the next hour or have a cup of coffee delivered to our doors, how accessible is information about the water quality coming from our taps?
Rebuilding trust in our nation’s drinking water starts with high-quality data that is robust, accurate, and accessible to the communities we serve.
Effective data management plays a critical role in helping states and EPA advance their mission to protect public health by ensuring that high-quality data support environmental and public health programs and decisions.
ASDWA members’ goal is to work with EPA and our partners to support water sector initiatives that seek to improve drinking water data quality, accuracy, completeness, and transparency. Further, to engage with those who use or are interested in drinking water data to meet these ends.
SDWIS manages information about PWSs and their violations of the National Primary Drinking Water Regulations (NPDWRs). The importance of SDWIS to the drinking water program cannot be understated. This software suite enables primacy agencies to manage water system inventory information, receive and collect system compliance monitoring data, manage sampling and monitoring schedules, determine candidate NPDWR violations, and track enforcement activity. It also provides tools to assist with required quarterly reporting of violations, inventory, and actions data to EPA’s SDWIS Fed database. While SDWIS has served the national drinking water program for decades, it requires modernization.
EPA has partnered with states to replace the aging SDWIS with a new application suite capable of effectively managing the ever-growing volume and complexity of data that the national drinking water program demands.