The states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska developed the Pacific Northwest Water Quality Data Exchange
to aggregate and access a comprehensive source of high-quality water data in the Pacific Northwest.
Working together, the states developed XML schema to share water
quality data. Each state then established a secure Network Node and began publishing
the data in XML. Simple query tools retrieve information from each Node. Now, each state can query for
sampling data from all states that share watersheds such as the
Columbia and Snake River basins.
In November 2006, the Snohomish County (WA) Department of Public Works joined the exchange and became the first county level organization to participate in the Exchange Network. The county is now sharing data and measurements from 249 of its monitoring sites.
The Pacific Northwest Water Quality Data Exchange is currently in version 1.3. The following links are to implementation resources for this most recent version.
