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State Water Board outlines BeachWatch data rules and debuts Beach Advisories & Closures dashboard
Summary
The State Water Board reviewed January 2026 BeachWatch data standard updates — new required fields, a controlled vocabulary and stricter validations — and demonstrated a weekly-updated Beach Advisories & Closures dashboard that pulls BeachWatch records and is available via the My Water Quality 'Safe to Swim' site and the California Open Data Portal.
The State Water Board on a May 2026 work-group call reviewed data-structure changes to BeachWatch and showed a new Beach Advisories & Closures dashboard intended to make postings, closures and rain-advisory trends easier to analyze.
Beverly Scharnhorst, an environmental scientist in the Ocean Standards Unit at the State Water Board, said the board updated BeachWatch on Jan. 1, 2026, to align with the California Environmental Data Exchange Network (CEDEN) and the board’s quality assurance plan. "We made three main updates as of January 1," Scharnhorst said, listing new required data fields such as lab agency code, lab batch, analysis date and time, a flag for results detected above the method detection limit, and quality-assurance codes.
The board also implemented a controlled vocabulary for key fields — sample and lab agency codes, sample type, parameter and method codes, qualifiers and QA codes — so entries will match EPA naming conventions and reduce inconsistent records. Scharnhorst said BeachWatch now enforces stricter validation rules to flag duplicates, blank fields and invalid field combinations, and to check RL/MDL/dilution consistency.
The work group then viewed a Tableau-based Beach Advisories and Closures dashboard hosted on the My Water Quality "Safe to Swim" website. Scharnhorst demonstrated filters for advisories, closures and rain-advisory events; county, swim-season and year filters; and outputs such as the number of occurrences, total days affected and a "beach mile days" metric that multiplies beach length by days affected. "The data is refreshed every week," she told attendees, and the dataset is also available for download from the California Open Data Portal.
Attendees raised questions about coverage; Hal McClain of East Bay Parks noted Contra Costa County appeared missing from the dashboard. Scharnhorst said some rollups and county mappings (for example, East Bay Parks versus Alameda/Contra Costa counties) still need refinement and promised to follow up. She provided a contact email (mywaterquality@waterboard.ca.gov) for dashboard feedback and said she would drop the dashboard link in the meeting chat.
The dashboard and the new BeachWatch validation rules are intended to improve data quality and public access, enable trend analysis across years and seasons, and simplify downloads for local analysis and presentations. Scharnhorst invited agencies with data issues or invoicing questions to contact the board and reminded agencies of an upcoming invoicing deadline for grant-funded monitoring work.
The work group moved on to guest presentations after the demo; Scharnhorst said staff will log coverage gaps and publish the dashboard link for agencies to review.
