The availability and suitability of existing information on municipal wastewater-treatment practices and effluent characteristics for use in a national water-quality assessment were evaluated. The information will be used to determine the effects of changes in wastewater-treatment practices on stream quality and ecosystem health. A large amount of information on treatment practices and effluent characteristics exists, and some of this information is available from Federal and State computer data bases. However, the suitability of existing information to accomplish the objectives of a national water-quality assessment is limited. The suitability of this information would be improved by (1) increasing the number of water-quality constituents routinely analyzed for in samples of municipal effluent, (2) increasing the frequency of effluent sampling at some facilities, (3) developing a quality-assurance plan for wastewater flow-rate determinates, and (4) increasing the amount of effluent water-quality data entered into Federal and State computer data bases.
The geographic information system was used to limit data for land use and soils to only those features within the border of a selected drainage basin. The geographic information system also was used to select the antecedentprecipitation-index data for the appropriate month for each modeled storm; to produce a statewide, three-dimensional surface of these data; and to calculate the average of this surface over the drainage basin. Once coverages were developed for the characteristics of each basin, the geographic information system was used to calculate the area-weighted averages for parameters describing these basin characteristics. Procedures were developed to output these averages, along with the model parameters for the basin, to a file for further processing by other programs.
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