EPA WATERS Tools and How’s My Waterway

EPA's integrated water quality data platform: map-based access to 303(d) impaired waters, TMDL status, watershed boundaries, and How's My Waterway — a public-friendly tool that summarizes water conditions for any location.

EPA's Watershed Assessment, Tracking & Environmental Results System (WATERS) consolidates water quality data from EPA, state agencies, and tribal programs into a single spatially-referenced platform. The four main entry points: (1) the Water Quality Portal, the joint EPA/USGS/NWQMC discrete sample database, (2) the WATERS GeoViewer for interactive mapping of impaired waters, watershed boundaries, and monitoring stations, (3) Tools for Automated Data Analysis (TADA), an open-source R package for cleaning and analyzing monitoring data, and (4) How's My Waterway, the public-facing tool that lets any user enter a zip code and get a plain-English summary of impairments, fish consumption advisories, and source water status.For watershed groups, How's My Waterway is the easiest way to onboard new community members — it tells the story of their stream in language a non-scientist understands. WATERS GeoViewer is the right tool for grant applications that need to demonstrate impairment status. TADA is the right tool for any group running a monitoring program that wants to standardize and report data alongside agency datasets.Everything is free and requires no login.