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U.S. Geological Survey
U.S. Geological Survey reports regional water quality over the Internet with NetCharts Server
Automated graphical report generation from database saves a man-month of labor each year and enables a hundred more chemical constituents to be displayed for the public to access.
Serving water quality information to the public
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program maintains the Nation's largest data warehouse of consistently-collected water quality information. The NAWQA Program is organized in large regional watersheds called study units.
In the Spring of 2004, the USGS began looking for ways to automate graphing the large volumes of water quality data. Among the requirements was the ability to display this graphical data on a public web site.
"We chose NetCharts Server from Visual Mining over other solutions because we needed the capability to produce time series and other scientific charts, which Server had built into it, and the ease of development made it a perfect choice.," says Harry House, Leader - Database Applications Team. "NetCharts Server also offered greater ease in setting up connections to our backend 10GB Oracle database. We are finding NetCharts Server to be a cost-effective solution."
Figure 1: The box graph above shows the concentration of Mercury in fish tisue and river sediment for the New England Coastal Basins. Note the dual X-axes that show both study unit and national detection frequencies.
In order to place regional studies in a national context, NAWQA uses Visual Mining software to dynamically generate sophisticated web-based graphical reports, which show how various water quality measures from a user-selected region compare to those for the country as a whole. These interactive graphical reports are available to the public over the Internet at http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/graphs.
USGS gains a man-month of time and more than doubles graphical reporting selections
Before the Visual Mining software was used, the NAWQA program would manually create a set of charts for their printed reports. Now that the Visual Mining software is deployed at NAWQA, the graphics are dynamically generated, which means once the data is quality assured, new graphics can be online quickly and without manual intervention.
NAWQA no longer needs to manually create their graphical reports. This will save more than a man-month of labor every year. Additionally, the public now has access to at least 100 more chemical constituent graphics than with the printed reports. And keeping the public better informed aligns well with USGS's mission.
About USGS:
USGS is a world leader in the natural sciences through our scientific excellence and responsiveness to society's needs. The USGS serves the Nation by providing reliable scientific information to:
- describe and understand the Earth;
- minimize loss of life and property from natural disasters;
- manage water, biological, energy, and mineral resources; and
- enhance and protect our quality of life.
More information on USGS may be found on the Agency website at http://www.usgs.gov.