Beginning with the 2015-2016 reporting year, agencies will input their nutrient and discharge data into the worksheet provided by the consultant team who is developing the Nutrient Annual Report, as required by the Nutrient Watershed Permit.  This page provides a list of answers to questions about the worksheet, and will be updated on an ongoing basis.

We recognize it is a significant effort to prepare this data and we appreciate your agency’s contribution.

 

Q:  Why do agencies need to enter their data into this sheet when they are already inputting their data into CIWQS?

A: There are several limitation of CIWQS that make it problematic as a source of data for the Nutrient Annual report.  Some examples include:

• Some agencies have different discharge points that are not accounted for in the CIWQS download query.
• Recycled water flows and zero discharge periods are not consistently reported to CIWQS.
• Agencies report different parameters for some analytes.

In the 2014-2015 reporting year, both the consultant and member agency staff spent considerable effort downloading, then QA/QCing the data.  While reporting monitoring data into this worksheet is more effort than just reporting to CIWQS alone, using this worksheet will be overall less effort since agencies will not need to do the additional QA/QC step that was so time-consuming the first year of the permit.

 

Q: How does this worksheet account for parameters that are below the Reporting Limit (RL)?

A:  Input the Reporting Limit (RL) into the worksheet, then input the value of the RL for that analyte into the comment box in row 7 of the worksheet.

 

Q: Why does the worksheet ask for influent data when influent monitoring is not required by the Watershed Permit?

A: While not required, some agencies are collecting influent data to assess removal rates, change in influent loads, and for other informational purposes.  If your agency is collecting this data, BACWA would like to compile it in case it is needed for future work.

 

Q: Do you want the spreadsheet filled out only for those days where some (or all?) of the nutrients were analyzed?  Obviously there is much more BOD and TSS data than for nitrogen species.

A:  We are requesting daily flow data and nutrients/BOD/TSS data only for days that nutrients are sampled.

 

Contact info for additional questions:

Mike Falk (Mike.Falk@hdrinc.com; 916.817.4916)

JB Neethling (JB.Neethling@hdrinc.com; 916.817.4830)

Holly Kennedy (Holly.Kennedy@hdrinc.com; 925.974.2617)