BEACON 2.0 - Beach Advisory and Closing On-line Notification

BEACON 2.0 User's Guide (PDF) (108 pp, 5.25 MB, About PDF)

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 jurisdiction-reported beach monitoring and notification data and is available online. The jurisdictions (include States, Tribes, and Territories) are not required to submit their beach season data to EPA until the beginning of the following calendar year and then we work with them to verify that the data is presented accurately on EPA's BEACON website. For links to jurisdiction webpages, please see: https://www.epa.gov/beaches/state-and-local-beach-programs.
The BEACON 2.0 User's Guide describes how to use the online BEACON 2.0 system to obtain jurisdiction-reported beach monitoring and notification data.

BEACON 2.0 Features

The revised BEACON 2.0 interface includes several enhancements from the previous version and now provides several ways to access beach monitoring and notification data. Enhancements include:

  • Beach Profile Details: The Beach Profile Detail contains summary data about a single beach. This report has been updated to ensure that it works well on mobile and tablet platform.
  • Mapping interface: The BEACON map includes many tools for finding and accessing data.
  • Report filter wizard: This tool walks users through three steps to select beaches, set search filters and view BEACON reports.
  • RSS feed generator: The BEACON RSS Generator provides you with the ability to generate an RSS feed for an filtered set of beaches.
  • National List of Beaches: Interactive Version: The report contains the most recent information reported to EPA by coastal and Great Lakes states, territories, and participating tribes.
  • EPA's Beach Report: Swimming Season: This report summarizes information that states, territories, and tribes with coastal and Great Lakes beaches submitted to EPA reporting beach closings and advisories for the selected swimming season year.

Reports created with the report wizard have the a wide range of functionality to accommodate users needs:

  • 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.

Latest Updates

BEACON 2.0 - Beach Advisory and Closing On-line Notification web application version 24.7.16 was last updated on July 24, 2024 A partial list of updates include:

  • Monitoring (Water Quality Data) is taken from the Water Quality Exchange (WQX). Monitoring data in BEACON is updated within 10 minutes of any new WQX submission.
  • Report pagination is improved and includes a drop-down list to jump to any page of records. The total count of records is shown at the top and bottom of all reports.
  • Definitions added to all reports. Each column in each report now is defined in a simple open/close table located above each report.
  • Beach Profile Report now formatted to work well in mobile phone and tablet format.
  • Improved URL formats and options to allow saving links to reports filtered as needed.

Known Issues

There are a number of known data processing and report performance issues that have not been resolved and prevent certain reports from fully functioning. Users are encouraged to report any issue that are not already recognized and reported in this list:

  • Beach Days Report is missing information for some jurisdictions.
  • Advisory and Monitoring report has duplicate rows.
  • Count of Beach Act Beach varies between all reports and the Jurisdiction Summary Report.

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 data provided in BEACON reports come from the following EPA databases:

  • PRogram tracking, beach Advisories, Water quality standards, and Nutrients (PRAWN). PRAWN stores beach administrative, advisory and closing data. For more information on PRAWN, see Submitting Data to EPA page.
  • EPA’s Water Quality Exchange (WQX). WQX is the framework by which organizations submit data to the US EPA. BEACON pulls water quality monitoring data from WQX. For more information on WQX, see Water Quality Data (WQX) page.
  • EPA’s 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.