Advancing Water Resources Research and Management

Robert King and Lee Manning

Background

STORET is EPA's STOrage and RETrieval system for water quality data. The original (legacy) STORET was a mainframe system developed in the 1960s. It has been the nation's primary water quality data storage system for the past 33 years and continues to be used by many state agencies, universities, and federal agencies.

In the early 1990s, the Office of Water began a multi-year effort to upgrade every major informational system dealing with water resources under its jurisdiction. The modernized relational database, known as new STORET, combines the information in legacy STORET, BIOS (BIOlogical System), and ODES (Ocean Data Evaluation System). This new system will allow for improved data storage capabilities creating a more flexible and easy-to use database.

Development

Modernization of the STORET system took seven years. During this time, EPA held 17 workshops nationwide designed to involve a wide range of stakeholders in the development process. EPA also held 4 National Workshops to test each part of the system as it was completed. All of these workshops were widely attended and included representatives from state agencies, interstate organizations, other federal agencies, local governments, tribes, academia, citizen groups, and the private sector.

Advantages

• EPA provides the new STORET FREE to all users on a CD-ROM.
• STORET is a PC-based, user friendly data management system. The system uses many of the basic Windows features and includes a "help" system to provide assistance from any screen or button.
• STORET can handle chemical data, biological community and sediment toxicity information, fish tissue analyses, and aquatic habitat evaluations.
• STORET requires quality assurance information such as when, how, why, and by whom samples were collected. This information will allow analysts and decision makers to share water quality data with more confidence than in the past.

Requirements

The STORET data system itself is free. In order to run the system, users need an IBM-compatible PC running Windows 95/98. For the stand alone version, the user needs Personal Oracle for Windows 95 or Windows NT, version 7.3.3 or 7.3.4 (a commercially available product for under $400).

STORET can also be used in a client-server mode - - that is, one or more PCs are attached to a network database server. In this mode, many users in an organization can work on STORET at the same time. The client server mode requires access to an oracle "data base server." Users then communicate with the server through an Oracle product called SQL-Net. (Users may access EPA's server at EPA's National Computer Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C.)

Legacy Data

Legacy STORET contains more than 250 million parametric water quality observations from more than one million sampling stations nationwide. To house this data, a read only database called the STORET Legacy Data Center (LDC) is being constructed. The LDC will house data from the current system for direct access now and in the future.

All data migrated from the LDC to the new STORET will require data owners to provide data documentation about their current legacy STORET data. EPA will provide the software to accomplish this migration.

More Information

To receive more information about the STORET system or to receive a copy of the FREE CD-ROM,

Additional information about STORET is also available at the STORET website at www.epa.gov/owow/STORET

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