Under the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health (BEACH) Act of 2000, EPA provides annual grants to coastal and Great Lakes states, territories, and eligible tribes to help local authorities monitor their coastal and Great Lakes beaches and notify the public of water quality conditions that may be unsafe for swimming. To learn more about the Beach Program, please visit the Beach Program Home Page.

Overview of BEACON 2.0

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created the BEach Advisory and Closing Online Notification (BEACON) system to meet the Agency's requirement to provide to the public a database of pollution occurrences for coastal recreation waters. EPA's response to this requirement, BEACON, contains state-reported beach monitoring and notification data and is available online. EPA recently updated BEACON to include several enhancements and has named the new system BEACON 2.0. The BEACON 2.0 User's Guide describes how to use the online BEACON 2.0 system to obtain state-reported beach monitoring and notification data.

BEACON 2.0 Features

The revised BEACON system includes several enhancements from the previous version and now provides several ways to access beach monitoring and notification data. Enhancements include:

• Revised mapping interface: The new BEACON map includes many new features and has greater functionality.
• New report creation wizard: This tool walks users through three steps to select beaches, set search filters and view BEACON reports.
• New RSS feed generator: The BEACON RSS Generator provides you with the ability to generate an RSS feed for an area of interest.

Each feature is accessible from the BEACON 2.0 interface.

BEACON 2.0 reports have the functionality to accommodate a wide range of users. These user roles include:

• Basic: You can access reports via the map interface. Only five BEACON reports are available from the map interface, however, and selecting the reports via the map will return data for the select beach only.
• Intermediate: You can use the report creation wizard to select data by any combination of state/tribe/territory, county, and/or beach. The complete list of BEACON reports is available in the wizard.
• Advanced: Once a report is opened, you can use the filtering tools available on the report page to modify previously selected filters and/or add new, more advanced filters, as well as change the look and feel of a report.

What are the sources of BEACON information?

The data available through BEACON have been provided to EPA by the coastal and Great Lakes states, tribes and territories that receive grants under the BEACH Act. For the most up-to-date information, contact the state or local beach manager using the contact information provided at the State, Tribe, and Territory Beach Contacts page.

The state-reported data found in BEACON come from the following EPA databases:

• Reach Address Database (RAD). RAD contains geographic data that define each beach's location and the location of water quality monitoring stations. BEACON pulls this data to display the beaches and stations on a map. For more information on RAD, see EPA's Reach Address Database page.
• STOrage and RETrieval (STORET) database and Water Quality Exchange (WQX). STORET is EPA's repository of the water quality monitoring data collected by water resource management groups across the country. WQX is the framework by which organizations submit data to STORET. BEACON pulls water quality monitoring data from WQX/STORET. For more information on WQX/STORET, see EPA's About STORET and WQX page.
• PRogram tracking, beach Advisories, Water quality standards, and Nutrients (PRAWN). PRAWN stores beach administrative, advisory and closing data. For more information on PRAWN, see EPA's Data User Corner page.