NowCasting Water Quality

After seven productive years working in close collaboration with the State of California and Heal the Bay, our team has realized our goal of developing a state-wide beach water quality NowCast system. The NowCast system provides daily predictions of water quality at over 20 beaches. The models are more accurate than actual water sampling since it takes over one day to get the sample results back, and during that time, beach water quality changes. You can download the app for iPhone or Android by searching for “beach report card” at the app store. The NowCast program will live on at Heal the Bay, the WHD team continues to build off our work by developing models for “data poor” beaches and forecast models. We are also interested in going “global” with the modeling system and also exploring how similar approaches can be used for modeling and predicting drinking water quality in low and middle income countries where water testing is too expensive to carry out regularly.