EPA Water Quality Portal (WQP) Service

The EPA Water Quality Portal (WQP) is a USGS/EPA cooperative service that provides access to water quality site metadata and sample results from over 2.6 million monitoring locations.

Overview

The WQP service provides access to:

Station search — Monitoring site metadata (locations, identifiers, types)
Result search — Sample results (analytical data, characteristics, dates)

Data is fetched live from the Water Quality Portal (opens in a new tab) REST API. No API key is required.

Available Tools

See the Tools Reference for complete tool documentation.

Quick Example

curl -X POST \
  -H "x-api-key: dev-key-12345" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": 1,
    "method": "tools/call",
    "params": {
      "name": "wqp.station_search",
      "arguments": {
        "statecode": "US:40",
        "characteristicName": "Atrazine"
      }
    }
  }' \
  http://localhost:3001/api/v1/services/wqp/mcp

Data Formats

Cleaned Format (Default)

Parsed CSV response as a list of row objects (rows) with a count and source_url. Column names match WQP CSV headers.

Raw Format

Original CSV string from the WQP API, plus mimeType and source_url.

Search Parameters

Common filters (use at least one):

bBox — Bounding box: west,south,east,north (decimal degrees WGS84)
statecode — FIPS state (e.g. US:40 for Oklahoma)
countycode — FIPS county (e.g. US:40:109)
countrycode — FIPS country code
siteid — Agency-siteId (e.g. USGS-07144100)
characteristicName — e.g. Atrazine, Caffeine
characteristicType — e.g. Nutrient
startDateLo / startDateHi — Date range (MM-DD-YYYY), mainly for result search

Data Sources

WQX (EPA) — Refreshed weekly (Thursday)
NWIS (USGS) — Available via WQP; see WQP Web Services (opens in a new tab) for current refresh policy.

Examples

See WQP Examples for more usage examples.

Examples Tools Reference