The
STORET System
Historical water
quality information is presented using data available from the
Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) STORET data system at http://www.epa.gov/storet.
STORET is short for STOrage and RETrieval
system. The STORET system maintains chemical, physical and biological data
on surface water, groundwater and pipes throughout the U.S. Local, state
and federal agencies, universities and volunteer monitors submit this data
to the EPA. The STORET system is divided into two parts: the Legacy Data
Center and the Modernized System. The Legacy Data Center (LDC) contains
water quality data from the early 1900’s to 1998. The Modernized STORET
System contains data from 1999 to the present.
From the main webpage at
http://www.epa.gov/storet, choose: “Obtaining Water Quality Data”
From there, choose to
browse or download Legacy STORET Data or Modernized STORET Data.
For Legacy data, go to:
“Query”, then to “Search by Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC),
Then, choose “02
Mid-Atlantic Region”
Then, choose “02080103
Rapidan-Upper Rappahannock (VA)
A choice of stations
appears representing the data submitted to EPA by various local, state and
federal agencies as well as academics and volunteers monitors. Surface
water, groundwater and pipe station data are accessible on this list.
Data in STORET is
organized by station. We selected our data by locating those stations on
the list with waterway names which matched the Culpeper SWCD’s current biological
stations.
For example, the District has a station located on the Piney River. We examined the list of stations in the STORET system for the
Rapidan-Upper Rappahannock basin for any stations that were labeled as
being on the Piney River. Then, we chose “Get Report” and requested a
“Station Description” Report. This report produces a listing of each
station chosen with its latitude/longitude along with a description of the
station or the monitoring program it was used for.
Using the Station Report,
we compared the lat/long of the District’s Save Our Streams stations with the
lat/long given for each station in STORET list. For example, we
compared the lat/long readings for all the listed sites on the Piney with
the lat/long of the District’s site on the Piney River. For those
stations that had closely matching or exact lat/long readings, we would go
back and request a “Detailed Data” report. This produces a report
which includes the lat/long of each requested station, the date of each
sample taken at that station, the time the sample was taken, the name of
the organization that submitted the data and the results themselves. These
results contain a variety of chemical parameters. If the results included
were more than 700, the report is generated overnight and available the
next morning through e-mail. If several stations listed in the STORET
database were geographically close to the District’s station locations,
we examined the years for which data was available. Ideally we were
looking for data from 1990 to 1998. We chose those stations for which the
greatest number of data points were available.
Not all CSWCD
stations have coordinating chemical data either because the data is not recent
enough, or because the monitoring stations used to collect STORET data were not close enough to the CSWCD stations to be useful.
The Detailed Data reports
use the following codes:
K = Off-scale low.
Actual value not known, but known to be less than value shown.
L = Off-scale high.
Actual value not known, but known to be greater than value shown.
U = Material was analyzed
for, but not detected. Value
stored is the limit of detection for the process in use.
In the case of species, Undetermined sex.
The STORET system does
contain valuable data, but the data is difficult to sort through. Ideally,
one could plug in a lat/long and receive back a list of stations that are
nearby, but that is not the case. A topographic map is necessary to work
with the STORET data in order to try and match chemical data from STORET
to the District’s biological monitoring sites
Also, since there are
different agencies submitting their data to STORET, the results are not
the same for all stations. For example, some may test total nitrogen while
other groups do not. So, the results you get may not be uniform unless all
of the stations are from one organization.
Some of the results were replicates
done at the same station. For these, we removed the outliers from the set
of replicates and averaged the remaining set of replicates.
We did not work with the Modernized
STORET system.
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