Now You Can Track The Severn’s Health Anytime!

Thanks to the hard work of our water quality monitoring team, and especially to our Field Investigator, Izzie Ketcham, you can now check on the health of the Severn River online at any time!

All of the water quality data collected from SRA’s network of 41 monitoring stations are posted on the Chesapeake Data Explorer, the data sharing platform run by the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative (CMC).

Click here to visit Chesapeake Data Explorer.

You do have to drill down a bit to locate the Severn River watershed.

Most of those blue dots on the map at left contain SRA’s WQ data and charts that track levels of oxygen, pH, temperature, salinity and clarity.

SRA’s weekly monitoring collection program extends from Indian Landing near the top of the river to Lake Ogleton and the creeks of Whitehall Bay.

Many of the other blue dots track fecal bacteria levels collected by our pals at Operation Clearwater, which is run by Prof. Tammy Domansky at Anne Arundel Community College.

The Spa Creek Conservancy also shares its Severn River water quality monitoring data on the Chesapeake Data Explorer.

Data Sharing With Scientific Community

Once posted on the Chesapeake Data Explorer, all the Data from SRA, SCC and Operation Clearwater are forwarded to the Chesapeake Bay Program and to the EPA’s Water Quality Exchange (WQX).

The CMC’s Chesapeake Data Explorer was developed as a data sharing platform specifically to enable scientific study and analysis. SRA is a certified Tier 2 data monitor following CMC’s monitoring protocols and quality assurance procedures.

Special thanks goes out to all our WQ Crew, our citizen scientist volunteers, who made this happen: Evan, Kathyrn, Mackenzie, Mark G., Joanie, Steve, Doug, Jim, Lisa, Theo, Izzie, Briana, Marla, Michael, Dave, Maya, Ted, JJ, Rob, Natalie, Tammy, Dede, Mark L., Liz, Nini, John Page, Elisabeth, Chris and Madison.

And a very special thanks to Izzie for crunching and wrestling with the data and slogging through the data upload procedure. We owe ya one Izzie!

Here are some of our WQ Crew at work: