RESOLUTION of the Advisory Committee on Water Information
Adopting the Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results of Chemical and Microbiological Analytes

Whereas: The Advisory Committee on Water Information (ACWI) is charged by the Office of Management and Budget through its Memorandum No. M92-01 to recommend procedures to coordinate funding, staffing, and the provision of other resources needed to support water-information activities for ensuring the best use of available resources; and;

Whereas: The National Water Quality Monitoring Council is charged with implementing the Strategy for Improving Water-Quality Monitoring in the United States, which contains the call to develop and foster monitoring activities for which the data quality is known and the documentation is adequate to support information sharing; and

Whereas: The National Water Quality Monitoring Council is to implement the Strategy in part by adopting, maintaining, and refining a data-element glossary to provide common terminology and definitions for documenting water-quality data; that is, metadata; and

Whereas: The Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results of Chemical and Microbiological Analytes is such a glossary; and,

Whereas: The Advisory Committee on Water Information believes that the Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results of Chemical and Microbiological Analytes were developed through a process that established a broad consensus on what represents the best practices in the management of water quality data; and

Whereas: The Advisory Committee on Water Information believes that adoption of these data elements in data collection programs and in data base development will lead to more cost-effective water quality data collection and utilization nationwide.

Now Therefore Be it Resolved that the Advisory Committee on Water Information adopts the Data Elements for Reporting Water Quality Results of Chemical and Microbiological Analytes and recommends it to all entities engaged in water quality data collection.

Adopted May 15, 2001