National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
The NOAA is a government institution that provides weather, water, and climate data to enhance the public health and protect property. The organization provides live rainfall data, which is used in our project to determine rainfall over a long period of time and in conjunction with other data to help construct a visualization of water contamination.
The Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System (CeNCOOS)
CeNCOOS is a collaborative source of data that seeks to help inform decisions about the oceans. For our project, we utilized turbidity data from the Santa Cruz station, a part of the Santa Cruz Ocean Observation Platform (SCOOP) located at the Santa Cruz wharf and maintained by UC Santa Cruz. The platform provides near real-time data of water salinity, turbidity, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen, and pH via a pump located 1m below the water surface that reports on conditions every 5 minutes. ERDDAP (Environmental Research Division’s Data Access Program) is a collective for data and data research and distributed the data from SCOOP.
Santa Cruz County
The County of Santa Cruz does testing on its recreational waters for coliform bacteria, which do not usually occur in open waters but appear as an indication of industrial waste. Waters are tested each week at 15 recreational sites and 30 other sites. We were given access to historical testing data, and we used the data from Cowell Beach to compile a color system based on the presence of coliform bacteria and regulatory standards for water contamination.
Weather Cat
We utilized the rainfall data from Weather Cat, a local weather station comprised of an anemometer, a rain gauge and a thermo-hydro sensor that updates every 5 minutes. The Weather Cat station provides historical data for each day.