First-ever water quality app allows users to instantly know the status of any beach or water body across Long Island, New York
It’s summer and Long Islanders are enjoying beaches, swimming, fishing, and even clamming. But how certain are you about the water you are about to jump into? Is it safe? Is your favorite beach open for swimming? Is clamming allowed where you just pulled up your boat? Should you be worried about red tides, or brown tides, or other harmful algal blooms? How do you even begin to find out this information? Knowing the importance of all of these questions to Long Islanders, scientists at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) have developed a one-stop shop to get all of this information: The Long Island Beach and Water Quality App, the world’s first-ever all-in-one water quality app for the public. Building on decades of research by the Gobler Laboratory at Stony Brook and public resources and reporting by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the New York State Department of Health, and the Nassau and Suffolk County Health Departments, the app provides up to the minute information on the open and closed status of hundreds of Long Island beach, and the open and closed status of every bay, harbor, estuary, and river on Long Island with regard to shellfishing. In addition, the app features weekly water quality monitoring by the Gobler Laboratory which covers more than 30 locations across Long Island and provides information on algae, fecal coliform bacteria, dissolved, oxygen, water clarity, and harmful algal blooms like brown and red tides. While all of that data is available on the app, this detailed scientific information is distilled down to a simple ranking of good, fair, or poor which is earned by each water body based on how conditions rank relative to state and federal water quality guidelines.
Sung-Gheel Jang, PhD
SoMAS Geospatial Center
Email: geospatial@stonybrook.edu
