Agreement between the USGS Water Resources Division and the EPA Assessment and Watershed Protection Division on the Solution of the STORET/NWIS Compatibility Issue May 17, 2000

The goal of this agreement is to ensure that to the public, both STORET and NWIS offer a common view, with similarly named data elements holding similarly defined data, and that NWIS and STORET would share standards for nomenclature and format to support such a common view, with the goal of enabling easy integration by the public of such data for analysis.

Further, it is a goal to ensure that both NWIS and STORET will offer the general public access to this common view of their data, over the Internet, with support for both browsing and downloading data. With the previous mainframe version of STORET, the USGS loaded all of their data into STORET. With the availability of web-based data retrievals and the agreement to have a common view on the web of both STORET and USGS data, it is no longer necessary or desirable for all USGS data to be loaded into STORET.

It is also our goal to ensure ease of transfer of data for those cooperating agencies with whom USGS has a cooperative agreement, and who desire to have the data from the cooperative agreement in their own copy of STORET.

Actions to Achieve these goals:

• Enhance the water quality portion of NWIS to incorporate additional fields which will hold formal descriptions of processes and equipment. These additional fields will include those required by the STORET software for data storage.
• Construct an automated batch data entry process such that data residing in NWIS can be extracted in a form which can be updated directly into a copy of STORET.
• Define coding identifiers that the cooperating agencies will use to prepare their STORET for entry of data from the NWIS batch files.
• This batch data entry shall be extended to cooperating agencies of both USGS and STORET, supported there by both software and suites of codes managed by the USGS for this purpose.
• Using this software and these suites of codes, cooperating agencies will be able to add to their local copies of STORET, such data as are generated for them by the USGS, and which have been first placed in NWIS.
• It is the intent of both parties that these goals be met by the first half of calendar year 2002.
• In the interim, both NWIS and STORET will be web enabled, with links to each other, within 6 months. A true common view from both systems will be achieved durign calendar year 2002.

Responsibilities:

• EPA will maintain and operate a central STORET data warehouse, providing the public the ability to browse or download STORET data, and will fully support the common nomenclature, format, and data definitions mutually agreed to with USGS.
• USGS will maintain and operate NWISWeb, providing the public the ability to browse or download USGS data and will fully support the common nomenclature, format, and data definitions mutually agreed to with EPA.
• EPA will provide functioning STORET capability, including software, database specifications, and training as required to make STORET operational in all those offices within the USGS which are designated by them.
• USGS will enhance the water quality portion of NWIS to include an ability to archive the process and equipment descriptions. These additional fields will include those required by the STORET software for data storage. EPA will provide full technical details concerning the design of STORET to facilitate this goal.
• USGS will develop software, which will extract data from NWIS, and convert these data into a STORET-compatible format, ready for batch entry into a local copy of STORET.
• USGS will develop a suite of code identifiers which, when entered into the receiving copy of STORET, will make it compatible with this extract of NWIS data, and which will allow the NWIS data extract to pass all edit checks of the STORET batch data entry subsystem, at which point these data will be updated into STORET.
• For cooperating agencies desiring to load NWIS data, the USGS will publish documentation and usage details of these code identifiers, and upon their adoption by each State client, the State copy of STORET will be able to batch load analytical data produced by the NWIS system.

Assumptions:

EPA assumes that STORET will be operational at release level 2.0 within one year of the date of this agreement.

USGS assumes that NWIS will be operational at release level 5_1 prior to implementation of the software/code suite solution outlined above.

Future releases of NWIS and STORET will be coordinated so that their compatibility is maintained.

 

The signatories below indicate approval of this agreement.