How's My Waterway January 2023 Webcast

Learn about the new features of How's My Waterway

January 25th, 2023. 2 pm - 3:30 pm Eastern. 

How’s My Waterway has new features! How's My Waterway is a user-friendly tool that was designed for anyone to easily find, access and understand information about their water quality. When a watershed is shown to have pollution or other issues, it inspires people to get involved to monitor, protect and restore their waterways. By displaying all of this information visually, it gives this data more perspective and transparency which results in the drive for change and innovation, especially in school aged children

How’s My Waterway answers questions about aquatic life, eating fish, swimming, drinking water, monitoring, restoration and protection. The public has access to water information in their community and state and at a national level.

Several recent enhancements to How’s My Waterway will be featured, including:

• Monitoring Tab Enhancements. On the community page, the Monitoring Tab now has a date slider with the ability to view monitoring data by watershed anywhere from the late 1800s to 2022 by selecting a date range. Separate Monitoring Report pages were also added which include ways to dig deeper into the data, view it on a chart by characteristic group and filter the data before downloading.
• New Tribal Pages. In celebration of National Native American Heritage Month, the How’s My Waterway team released Tribal Pages on November 22, 2022. These pages inform tribal communities of water quality issues that can impact fishing, swimming, and other activities. They display the results of the first 14 Tribal program water quality assessments performed under the CWA 106 grant program and reported electronically to EPA. With these pages, Tribal reports will, for the first time, have been made available alongside state and territory-based assessments.
• Educators Section. How’s My Waterway now has an Educators Section with resources for educators including a Middle School Lesson Plan and a University Lesson Plan.

• CyAN Satellite Imagery. On the community page, the Monitoring Tab now has daily data on cyanobacteria (sometimes referred to as blue- green algae) at the time of detection. This data provides access to cyanobacterial bloom satellite data for over 2,000 of the largest lakes and reservoirs across the United States. Data is collected daily and cyanobacteria estimates are shown on a chart for an entire week at a time. Cell concentration estimates are also shown for each separate day using a date slider.  The estimated bloom area on the map is displayed using NASA satellite imagery.

How’s My Waterway is most frequently used by students and educators at all grade levels and capabilities. Teachers and after school programs have begun to build curriculums around using the tool to help children explore their local waters and learn how they can become environmental stewards. How’s My Waterway is also frequently accessed by the public, including concerned citizens, watershed organizations, non-profits, realtors, volunteer monitoring groups, decision makers and many others.

Speaker:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Wetlands, Oceans & Watersheds

• Kiki Schneider, IT Specialist, Water Data Integration Branch
• Cynthia N Johnson, Environmental Protection Specialist, Water Data Integration Branch

Webcast Flyer

For more information on How’s My Waterway visit: https://www.epa.gov/waterdata/hows-my-waterway. To access the tool directly visit: https://mywaterway.epa.gov/