Building a National Water Quality Monitoring Program

摘要

Planning is now under way to establish a new national body—the National Water Quality Monitoring Council—that will be charged with integrating the many public and private water monitoring programs at all geographic scales into a coordinated effort to assess the quality of America's waters. Most current monitoring programs, although gathering valuable data for specific purposes such as compliance, were not designed to address integrated national needs. Significant information gaps exist, and data from local programs are often difficult to merge in order to address state, tribal, and national water quality concerns. As a result, there has been insufficient information to determine whether overall Clean Water Act (CWA) goals are being achieved or whether increasingly stringent point source treatment is yielding measurable nationwide environmental benefits.