River Water Quality Monitoring 1990 to 2018: Dissolved Copper

River Water Quality Monitoring 1990 to 2018 - Dissolved Copper provides raw environmental data from monitoring sites across Northern Ireland's surface waters. The dataset supports the Water Framework Directive (WFD) regulatory framework, which aims to achieve 'Good Ecological Status' and 'Good Chemical Status'. It contains unprocessed measurements that require further calculation for official status assessments.

Use Cases

• Analyzing trends in dissolved copper concentrations in rivers and lakes from 1990 to 2018.
• Supporting regulatory status calculations for the Water Framework Directive, considering factors like altitude and alkalinity.
• Identifying potential data anomalies or contamination events flagged as erroneous results in the raw data.
• Providing baseline physico-chemical property data for integrated water quality studies involving biological and hydromorphological criteria.

Strengths

• Covers a long temporal range from 1990 to 2018.
• Part of a series of water data sets released as Open Data, indicating institutional commitment.
• Explicitly documented as raw data, preserving original measurement values for transparency.

Limitations

• Metadata completeness is low: specific column names, row counts, and file sizes are unknown across all sources.
• Data is raw and contains unvalidated results, including potential errors from typos, sampling, or contamination.
• Missing critical metadata for WFD calculations, such as Limits of Detection and Limit of Quantitation.

Provenance

Source

Northern Ireland Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) / Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA)

Collection Method

Monitoring from river and lake sites, likely part of regulatory Water Framework Directive programs.

Time Range

1990 to 2018

Freshness

2026-04-15 14:21:27.202540

Geography

Northern Ireland (rivers, lakes, transitional waters, and coastal waters)