The Water Quality Exchange (WQX) allows Network partners to share ambient water quality data with the U.S. EPA. WQX represents the next evolution for EPA's STORET model for sharing water quality data. EPA will transition away from a distributed database model towards the Exchange Network model for the sharing of data. This transition is expected to be fully completed in 2009. The release of WQX constitutes a major component of that transition. For more information on WQX and the future of STORET, please visit the website of U.S. EPA's Office of Water or read the WQX Success Story.
Version 1.0 of the WQX provides the means for partners to share the following types of data:
The physical conditions in the environment at the time of a site visit;
The chemical and bacteriological make-up of the water sampled;
Chemical analyses of fish tissue collected.
Version 2.0 of the WQX expands on WQX v1.0 and provides the means for partners to share all v1.0 data types as well as the following:
Biological Taxon Abundance data, including population census, frequency class, group summaries, and individual results;
Toxicity data;
Habitat Assesment scores and their related metric scores;
Biological Index scores and their related metric scores.
U.S. EPA is now ready to accept test and production submissions using version 2.0 of the WQX schema. Network partners interested in doing so should contact the WQX team at storet@epa.gov. Please note that EPA will continue to support both versions of the schema, so current v1.0 users will not need to transition to v2.0. EPA does not currently have plans to discontinue support of v1.0.
Because many water monitoring programs use biological and habitat data as the basis for assessing water quality, WQX version 2.0 enhances the richness of information available for data sharing, analysis, and improved decision making by watershed managers. All data shared using the WQX framework can be accessed on-line in the STORET Data Warehouse, EPA's repository for water quality data. Please visit http://www.epa.gov/storet/wqx.html for more information.
implementation resources
WQX Version 2.0
The WQX documentation package has been received and reviewed by the NTG Conformance Committee. The Committee has deemed the schema and supporting flow documentation acceptable for use on the Exchange Network. The most recent version of the WQX data exchange is version 2.0. The following links
are to implementation resources for this most recent version. See below for links to resources for previous versions.
The WQX FCD includes information about flowing both WQX v1.0 and v2.0 data. Please see section 2 (Component Alignment and Change History) within the document for information about differences between FCD v1.0 and v2.0.
Of special note: For backward compatibility with WQX v1.0, the “WQX.GetDomainValueByElementName” and “WQX.GetTransactionHistoryByParameters” Query and Solicit requests still support the v1.0 name, while all other requests have been versioned to be v2.0 compatible.
The WQX documentation package has been received and reviewed by the NTG Conformance Committee. The Committee has deemed the schema and supporting flow documentation acceptable for use on the Exchange Network.
Partners sharing WQX data will need to acquire a Network Authentication Authorization Service or (NAAS) Account as well as a WQX Organization ID. NAAS Accounts must be set up for both test and production environments.
Please ask your organization's Node Administrator to obtain a NAAS Account for test and production. Node Administrator contact information can be found on the Exchange Network Progress page.
Once you have a NAAS Account, please contact the STORET Team for a WQX Organization ID. The STORET Team will set up a WQX ORG ID that associates with your test or production NAAS Account. You may request an ID by contacting the STORET help desk either by email (storet@epa.gov) or by phone (1-800-424-9067). The STORET Help Desk will ask that you provide the following information in order to set up the Org ID:
Org ID: (Org ID is your choice and may be up to 30 characters long)
Organization Name
Contact Name
Contact Email
Address
Phone
Date Needed
NOTE: All organizations submitting data through WQX will require a new WQX Organization ID that is unique from any previous STORET Org IDs. This ensures that users do not duplicate data already within an Organization in the STORET Warehouse when submitting data through WQX.
contact information
For more information on this data exchange, please contact:
Kristen Gunthardt
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(202) 566-1194
