Organisation: Environment Agency
Location: National
Type: Apps & Tools
Link: Visit Website
The Bathing Water Data Explorer is an application designed to enable people to explore information about English and Welsh designated bathing waters that has been produced by the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales.
The Bathing Water Data Explorer homepage provides two ways to find a bathing water. You can search by name of a bathing water (beach) or names of counties or districts that contains bathing waters or a full postcode. As you type in the search box names of all those districts, counties and bathing waters that contain the search term so far will appear, at any point you can click on one of the results to make a choice. Clicking on a bathing water’s name will take you to the bathing water’s profile page.
Alternatively, you can use the controls on the map or your mouse or pointing device to pan and zoom to a region of the map. The icons show all of the bathing waters in that area. Hovering the pointer over an icon will show the bathing water’s name. Clicking on an icon will take to you the bathing water’s profile page.
Once you have located a bathing water, you can read its Bathing Water Profile, which includes a summary description and photograph of the beach and detailed information about the surrounding area, rivers and streams feeding into the site and a pollution management plan.
They also include maps of the locations of natural drainage catchment and of locations of water quality related features including as surface water outfalls, emergency or storm overflows and treated sewage works outfall.
The bathing water profile pages also contain a summary of annual bathing water quality compliance results (measuring the overall water quality for a given year) for the last five years and the most recent in-season sample assessment result.