National Water-Quality Assessment

Since the 1970s, roughly $500 billion has been spent on water pollution abatement; it is unclear, however, whether this investment is paying off because the data needed to assess the quality of the nation's water are unavailable. In 1986, the U.S. Geological Survey began the National Water-Quality Assessment Program to fill this void. This report identifies (1) the obstacles that the program has encountered in obtaining, interpreting, and disseminating water-quality data from various sources; (2) approaches being used to overcome these obstacles; and (3) the potential these approaches hold in solving water-quality data collection and management problems.

GAO found that: (1) the NAWQA program has sought ways to cooperate and share related data with other federal, state, and local agencies to offset the expense of collecting, analyzing, and storing water-quality data and provide a national assessment of water resources; (2) NAWQA has encountered many obstacles in obtaining existing external data including the data's inability to meet NAWQA needs as a secondary user, the lack of data uniformity and inconsistent data management practices between NAWQA and other data collection organizations, secondary users' uncertainty of the quality of data it did not collect, and difficulties in determining how to use data collected by other organizations that have different sampling and analysis practices; (3) some local NAWQA sites have had success in overcoming obstacles by expanding their sampling and analysis activities to meet NAWQA needs, examining quality assurance procedures, and developing compatible software to permit electronic data transfer; and (4) interagency and intergovernmental efforts to overcome data obstacles include establishing programs that examine data quality and facilitate interagency coordination, developing national water-quality data standards and procedures, and implementing a national strategy to integrate monitoring efforts, efficiently use resources, effectively distribute information, and provide comparable data.