California Coastal Water Quality Monitoring Inventory

Welcome to the California Coastal Water Quality Monitoring Inventory.

Water quality monitoring provides important information to environmental managers, regulators, and citizen groups about the condition of the State's Coastal Waters. However, since there are many individual programs which currently exist, each providing information, it has been difficult to find who is monitoring what, and where.

The purpose of this Web Site is to provide information about California's Coastal Water Quality Monitoring Programs. Information available includes:

Listings of the major water quality monitoring programs along the California Coast and its Bays.
Details about each program including the types of water quality measurements made, where, frequency of measurement, and quality assurance information information. You can search the inventory for specific information.
Contact information including World Wide Web links to programs that have Web sites and/or actual data bases, where available.
A Plan for improving coastal water quality monitoring in the future.
The text of coastal water quality monitoring legislation that mandated this inventory

New information can be added to the inventory using the available data entry form.

How the Inventory was created.
Governor Pete Wilson initiated the California Coastal Water Quality Monitoring Inventory and internet web site through Executive Order W-162-7, signed October 8, 1997. The Order requires the State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board), part of the California Environmental Protection Agency, to prepare an inventory of existing ocean and coastal water quality monitoring programs in the State and make these data accessible through the California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES).

Assembly Bill No. 1429 (Shelley) also included provisions for an inventory and Internet access. Assembly Bill No. 1581 (Keeley) provided funds to prepare the inventory and website.

The San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI), the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP) and the Marine Pollution Studies Laboratory (DFG-MPSL) of the California Department of Fish and Game in Moss Landing developed this coastal water quality monitoring inventory under contract to the State Water Board.

SFEI

SCCWRP

DFG-MPSL