If Adam Mednick is successful, coastal managers will no longer have to rely on frequent but out-of-date water-quality tests to make public health decisions at the state’s 120 Great Lakes beaches.
Instead, they’ll be testing less frequently and using an approach known as “nowcasting” to get more timely and accurate information into the hands of beach managers and the public.
Mednick, who recently earned his Ph.D. from UW Madison, is now working with Wisconsin Sea Grant as a research associate. His primary directive is to expand the reach of the nowcast approach – which relies on real-time computer modeling of bacteria concentrations – to more of Wisconsin’s coastal beaches and to help local communities make it a routine practice.
Even though the basic nowcasting approach has been around for several years, it represents a seismic shift in beach water-quality monitoring. Typically, beach managers have tracked water quality conditions and issued warnings based on water samples collected and analyzed for bacteria concentrations in a lab.
“The problem with that approach is that it typically takes 18-to-24 hours to get the results, which means that those advisory decisions made by a local health or parks department are based on the previous day’s conditions,” said Mednick.
Rather than relying entirely on a daily sampling and testing structure, nowcasting uses computerized statistical models to predict the concentration of E. coli bacteria within a beach’s nearshore waters, based on environmental conditions that are readily measurable—things like weather conditions, lake currents, wave height and water clarity.
“The combination of these types of variables can tell us what the likely water quality is, as opposed to having to wait until the next day for lab results,” said Mednick. “We can, with relative accuracy, predict whether there’s a health risk to swimming on a given day.”
In a previous position with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Mednick helped to expand the use of nowcast models, working closely with local managers across the region, as well software developers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to develop and implement a pair of computer systems that form the pillars of beach nowcasting.
The first is a desktop decision-support tool called “Virtual Beach.” This software walks users through the process of developing and running the statistical models used to predict real-time water quality. The second is a Web data-portal called EnDDaT (Environmental Data Discovery and Transformation), which provides easy and free access to a wealth of historical and real-time environmental data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other sources across the Great Lakes.
Having access to this wealth of data is not only useful for predicting current water quality, but also in assessing where the old approach often fell short.
“We’ve analyzed the historical data and found that a lot of days where beaches were closed, they didn’t really need to be. There were also a lot of days when the beaches were not closed when they should have been,” said Mednick. “That has both a public health and an economic impact.”
With funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, Mednick worked with the DNR and USGS to implement operational nowcasts at more than 20 of the Wisconsin’s coastal beaches, as well as beaches in other states; however, there is still a lot of ground to cover.
Part of Mednick’s role at Sea Grant will be to develop management guidelines for public health departments, to establish a users’ group, and to develop online training and help resources so that they can learn to operate nowcasting more efficiently. Helping communities to institutionalize the approach – so that it doesn’t die off when key personnel depart or retire – is likely to be one of his biggest challenges.
“We’re trying to increase the number of users, but we’re also conscious of the fact that in the future, there is likely to be less centralized technical support and service from USGS and DNR,” he said. “We’re trying to help the community-of-practice to take more of a leadership role in making this sustainable. We want it to essentially stand on its own.”
Funding for Wisconsin communities to conduct beach monitoring largely comes from the EPA, through the 2000 BEACH Act. That’s likely to be temporary as well: In recent years, BEACH Act funding has been zeroed out, only to be restored at the last minute.
“One of the key pieces of this work has to do with cost savings,” said Mednick. “If you don’t have to send somebody out to the beach every day and get them back to the lab (to run a test), that’s a big savings. You can reduce the cost of monitoring the beach…while improving public health protection.”
Mednick knows that community and public participation will be a big part of his project’s success, but he also knows there’s an interest among both groups to find a better way to monitor and communicate.
“The main thrust is getting better information to the public in real time,” said Mednick. “The hurdle is showing communities that, really, it’s not that hard to do.”
To watch an interview with Mednick about his new role with Wisconsin Sea Grant, visit http://bit.ly/1BAKSxv
