[Federal Register Volume 66, Number 52 (Friday, March 16, 2001)]
[Notices]
[Pages 15273-15275]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 01-6508]


-----------------------------------------------------------------------

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

Geological Survey


Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results of Chemical and 
Microbiological Analytes

AGENCY: U.S. Geological Survey, Interior.

ACTION: Notice of availability and request for comments.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

SUMMARY: Notice of availability is hereby given for a 45-day public 
comment period on the proposed set of Data Elements for Reporting Water 
Quality Results of Chemical and Microbiological Analytes developed by 
the National Water Quality Monitoring Council. The Council prepared 
this critical core set of data elements to facilitate the sharing of 
chemical and microbiological water quality data and promote efficiency 
in the monitoring of water resource quality programs. The Council will 
hold public meetings to take public comment on this proposal at four 
locations. The suggested audiences for this proposal include program 
managers responsible for developing and using water quality data, 
researchers, data analysts, and database managers in the public and 
private sectors and the general public with interests in development 
and use of water quality data.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

I. Background

    Water quality monitoring is an increasingly important element of 
water quality management activities. It provides information for an 
accurate understanding of the conditions of waters and the trends in 
observed water quality. Water quality must be understood in order that 
valid and effective restoration and protection programs can be designed 
for waterbodies that vary significantly in their vulnerability and 
pollution stress. Because of the cost of its collection, water quality 
data must be viewed as a resource worthy of careful management both to 
preserve it for future analyses by the agency that collects it and to 
share it among local, state, and federal agencies, and the private 
sector involved in resource management activities.
    The National Water Quality Monitoring Council has identified the 
standardization of water quality data elements as important in the 
preservation and use of data and is proposing today a list of data 
elements that offer both definitions of each element and lists of 
related groups of elements needed to provide a complete picture of the 
sampling and analytic activity. In 1995, the predecessor organization 
to the Council, the Intergovernmental Task Force on Monitoring Water 
Quality (ITFM), identified the need for a set of minimum data elements 
to facilitate sharing and exchange of information (ITFM, 1995a). The 
ITFM also developed a recommended list of data elements for use in 
establishing new, or modernizing existing, databases, which served as 
the starting point for today's proposal (ITFM, 1995b). This list is 
expected to influence the collection of water quality data by federal, 
state, and local agencies; academic institutions; the private sector; 
and citizens who volunteer their efforts. These are the groups that 
together collect the majority of ambient water quality data in the 
country.
    The core set of Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results 
of Chemical and Microbiological Analytes is expected to be presented to 
the Advisory Committee on Water Information at its May 2001 meeting and 
to be available to the U.S.

[[Page 15274]]

Environmental Protection Agency for consideration as one of the growing 
list of data standards it is adopting, as well as for voluntary use by 
other local, state and federal agencies and the private sector.
    In the future, the National Water Quality Monitoring Council is 
planning to develop data elements to address higher level biological 
indicators of water and habitat quality for ecological analysis. The 
Council has concurrent efforts to foster more consistent analytic 
techniques and more widespread information sharing as a means of 
reducing costs and increasing the data available for decisions.

II. Proposal

    The Council believes that by proposing a core set of data elements, 
agencies collecting water quality data will be spared the task of 
creating their own systems for organizing metadata and their own set of 
definitions of the metadata elements. When implemented, a standard set 
of data elements will spare all data users the complex task of 
reconciling diverse metadata systems as they draw on multiple data sets 
to carry out their studies or analyses. The Council believes that the 
standardization inherent in the use of standard data elements holds the 
prospect of reducing costly duplicate monitoring efforts.
    These data elements are proposed as guidelines to define a measure 
of good practice within the water quality monitoring community. They 
will encourage greater data consistency, allow the quality of data to 
be determined by future users, and simplify the process for all who 
choose to enter these metadata elements. It is not required that all 
the proposed data elements be used. Metadata selected must fit the data 
they describe. Sampling data from ground water, for instance, is 
described by several metadata elements that are of no use for surface 
water samples. Therefore, the Council does not intend to require anyone 
to provide all of the proposed elements in order for data to be entered 
in a federally maintained database. The Council's advocacy of these 
data elements is not intended to discourage the use of existing water 
quality data solely because it does not meet these guidelines.
    The core set of Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results 
of Chemical and Microbiological Analytes cover wells, surface water 
stations, and precipitation. This list is intended to standardize the 
preservation of data and to facilitate its sharing by standardizing 
definitions and by defining the list of data, metadata and their 
descriptive definitions. A data element is the name of a set of 
information with the same attribute. A data element may be a data field 
in a database such as a laboratory name, and analyte, or the latitude 
of the sampling station. Examples of metadata elements include such 
things as sampling and laboratory procedures, quality controls, and 
locational measurement accuracy.
    The list of data elements is not specific to any particular 
database, but is intended to be used voluntarily by agencies, 
organizations and individuals to guide their reporting, storage, and 
sharing of water quality data. This list is intended primarily to guide 
the collection of ambient water quality data, but many of the allowable 
sample location and sample type descriptions are versatile enough to be 
useful in collecting these data in other settings.
    The list of data and metadata elements is divided into categories 
that describe who collected and analyzed the sample, what was analyzed, 
why the sample was undertaken, when the sample was collected and 
analyzed, where the sampling occurred, and how the analysis was done. 
The list is intended to describe the breadth of information needed to 
ensure the continuing utility of the information both within an 
organization and between organizations as information is stored and 
shared, but without being an exhaustive list of every possible data 
element that could be reported. The Council devoted great efforts to 
focus the core set of data elements on the essential data needed across 
programs, recognizing that if more extensive data from a particular 
monitoring program were collected, it could be made available as well.

III. Authority

    The Office of Management and Budget memorandum M-92-01, 
Coordination of Water Resources Information (OMB, 1991), established 
the Water Information Coordination Program (WICP) to ensure 
coordination of water information programs.
    The Department of the Interior, through the U.S. Geological Survey, 
was designated as the lead agency for the WICP. The Memorandum M-92-01 
directed all other Federal organizations funding, collecting, or using 
water resources information to assist the U.S. Geological Survey in 
ensuring the implementation of an effective WICP. The WICP was 
specifically charged with developing uniform standards, guidelines, and 
procedures for the collection, analysis, management, and dissemination 
of water information in order to improve quality, consistency, and 
accessibility nationwide.
    The WICP created the Advisory Committee on Water Information (ACWI) 
under the provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). FACA 
provides the procedures for an advisory committee to be established in 
the interest of obtaining advice or recommendations for the President 
or one or more agencies or officers of the Federal Government. ACWI 
created the National Water Quality Monitoring Council to make 
recommendations on how to coordinate and provide guidance and technical 
support for the voluntary implementation of the recommendations 
presented in the Strategy for Improving Water Quality Monitoring in the 
United States (ITFM, 1995b) by government agencies and the private 
sector.
    The intent of the Strategy is to stimulate the monitoring 
improvements needed to achieve comparable and scientifically defensible 
information on interpretations, and evaluations of water quality in 
fresh surface, water, estuaries and near coastal water, ground water, 
and precipitation at local, watershed units, regional, and national 
levels. The information is required to support decision making at 
local, state, tribal, interstate, and national scales.
    During the assembly of the list of data elements, the work groups 
assembled by the Council attempted to reduce the number of recommended 
data elements in order to minimize the burden of recording the 
information each element requires. The Council believes the current 
list is the core set of elements that are reasonable to collect and 
record in order to allow people, in addition to those initially 
collecting the data, to use the data with confidence. This position is 
predicated on the Council's belief that water quality data is an 
investment with value over time in a single organization and between 
organizations and that the investment must be adequately protected with 
metadata describing the data such as the Council proposes today. This 
represents a departure from current practice for many water quality 
monitoring programs, and the Council would like to learn of different 
and/or opposing views on this issue.
    One specific issue within the wider issue of metadata is the 
recording of information about quality control samples, and whether the 
set of data elements affords adequate reference to them.
    As with any list of data elements, the selection of the specific 
names to be used and their definitions are important. The Council 
welcomes any specific

[[Page 15275]]

comments or expressions of preferences in this regard.

IV. Consultation

    The Core Set of Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results 
was developed through a collaborative effort with representatives from 
the following local, State, and Federal agencies and the water 
industry, which are members of the Council:
     East Bay Municipal Utility District (California)
     Hampton Roads Sanitation District (Virginia)
     Orange County Water District (California)
     Merck, Inc.
     National Water Research Institute
     George Washington University
     Association of Public Health Laboratories
     Delaware River Basin Commission
     Florida Department of Environment Protection
     Virginia Department of Environmental Quality
     New Jersey State Geological Survey
     New York Department of Health
     Washington State Department of Ecology
     Arizona Department of Environmental Quality
     National Institute of Standards and Technology
     US Geological Survey
     US Environmental Protection Agency
    The Council also held a National Water Quality Monitoring 
Conference in Austin, Texas, in April 2000, at which it sponsored a 
workshop attended by a wide range of representatives from local, state, 
and federal agencies and the private sector concerning the content, 
focus, need and future use of a core set of water quality data 
elements. The workshop participants overwhelmingly supported this 
effort.

V. Public Meetings

    Public hearings will be held to take public comment on the core set 
of Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results at the following 
locations, dates and times:
    Chicago, IL--March 23, 2001 from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m., in the 
Morrison Room at the General Services Administration Conference Center, 
3rd Floor, Room 331, Metcalf Building, 77 West Jackson Boulevard, 
Chicago, IL.
    San Francisco Bay Area, CA--March 27, 2001, from 10 a.m. until 3 
p.m., in Room 3240A at the U.S. Geological Survey offices at 345 
Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, CA.
    Denver, CO--March 28, 2001, from 9 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. in the 
Sabine-Cleere Room, first floor of Building A, of the Colorado 
Department of Public Health and Environment, 4300 Cherry Creek Drive, 
South, Denver, CO.
    Washington, DC--April 4, 2001, from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. in the 
Sydney Yates Auditorium, floor 1, of the U.S. Department of the 
Interior, 1849 C Street, NW., Washington, DC.
    The suggested audiences for this proposal include program managers 
responsible for developing and using water quality data, researchers, 
data analysts, and database managers in the public and private sectors, 
and the general public with interests in development and use of water 
quality data.

VI. Electronic Access and Filing of Comments

    You may view and download the draft recommendations for the core 
set of Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results on the USGS 
Water Information Coordination Program's Internet site at: http://wi.water.usgs.gov/pmethods/elements/elements.html
    The Question and Answer section of the web site provides additional 
information. If you require a paper copy to be sent to you, you must 
contact the EPA Safe Drinking Water Hotline at (800) 428-4791 and 
request that it be sent to you. You may submit comments by electronic 
mail (e-mail) to [email protected]. Submit comments as an ASCII or 
WordPerfect file avoiding the use of special characters and any form of 
encryption. Comments may also be mailed to: Water Docket, Docket No. W-
01-02, MC 4101, U.S. EPA, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW., Washington, DC 
20460. Comments being hand-delivered should be addressed to: Water 
Docket, Docket No. W-01-02, MC 4101, Room BE 57, U.S. EPA, 401 M 
Street, SW., Washington, DC 20460. Identify all comments and data in 
electronic or written form by docket Number W-01-02. Electronic and 
written comments must be received by the docket by April 30, 2001, for 
consideration in formulating a final core set of Data Elements for 
Reporting Water Quality Results.
    Documents relevant to this proposal are available for inspection 
from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday, excluding 
legal holidays at the Water Docket, East Tower, Room EB 57, U.S. EPA, 
401 M Street, SW., Washington, DC. For access to docket (Docket No. W-
01-02) materials, please call (202) 260-3027 between 9:00 a.m. and 3:30 
p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday to schedule an appointment. A 
reasonable fee may be charged for copying.

VII. For Further Information

    For additional information concerning today's proposal, you may 
contact: Charles Job, Drinking Water Protection Division, Office of 
Ground Water and Drinking Water (MC-4606), U.S. Environmental 
Protection Agency, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW., Washington DC 20460, 
or Charles Peters, U.S. Geological Survey, 8505 Research Way, 
Middleton, WI 53562.

VIII. References

    Office of Management and Budget. 1991. Coordination of Water 
Resources Information. Memorandum M-92-01 (dated December 10, 1991).
    Intergovernmental Task Force on Monitoring Water Quality. 1995a. 
Strategy for Improving Water-Quality Monitoring in the United States, 
Final Report of the Intergovernmental Task Force on Monitoring Water 
Quality.
    Intergovernmental Task Force on Monitoring Water Quality. 1995b. 
Strategy for Improving Water-Quality Monitoring in the United States, 
Final Report of the Intergovernmental Task Force on Monitoring Water 
Quality; Technical Appendices.

    Dated: March 9, 2001.
Robert M. Hirsch,
Associate Director for Water.
[FR Doc. 01-6508 Filed 3-15-01; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4310-Y7-M