Greetings all, I am looking to source the UK Environment Agency river water quality chemistry datasets but currently having trouble in identifying exactly where these data can be found. My understanding is that these data are openly and freely available but have had no luck thus far.
Has anyone used this resource before? If so, any assistance on how I can obtain these data would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Please Ref:
River quality-Environmental Agency -
maps.environment-agency.gov.uk
This site may be useful https://data.gov.uk/data/search?q=water+chemistry You have to register to download the data.
There were some internal tensions within the EA when the HQ tried to assert control over the historically independent regional (river basin) centres. These ere dealt with but not entirely resolved by a kind o Mexican stand-off. The regional offices hold he data as well as national archives but you'd be better off making friends with those in the regional offices who actually plan and organise the data collection. You should also make friends, separately but not secretly, with the HQ Staff who are responsible for the data too. The interpretation of the data is also important. There was, and maybe still is, a tendency among statistically trained data analysts to assume that water quality varies such that the deviation of samples from the mean is normally distributed about the mean. But water temperature, which drives such variables as dissolved oxygen, BOD, and fish and phytoplankton populations, does not vary randomly but is close to zero in midwinter, rises slowly to about 25 degrees in mid to late summer and then falls quite rapidly to around zero by January. There is also a tendency to equate BOD levels with human and animal pollution but leaf fall in autumn typically contributes a greater amount of BOD (depending on the nature of land use in the catchment) than do humans. Fish can tolerate brief exposures to low DO but prolonged exposure is more detrimental, although harder to pick up on a monthly sampling Programme.
Between 2006-7 I managed an EU funded project on the Lower Dnister in Ukraine, close to Odessa. Our task was to support the production of a River Basin Management Plan for the Lower Dnister by the Regional Environment Dept. Although the task was absurd and beyond our resources we collected a great deal of data including a five year run of monitoring data of this stretch of the river, which llustrates all the points I make above.
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