Under the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health (BEACH) Act of 2000,
the 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, visit the
Beach Program Home Page.
About 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. The EPA's response to this requirement,
BEACON, contains jurisdiction-reported beach monitoring and notification data and is available online.
The jurisdictions (including
States, Tribes, and U. S. Territories) are not required to submit their beach season data to
the EPA until the beginning of the following calendar year and then we work with them to verify that the
data is presented accurately on the EPA's BEACON website.
The BEACON 2.0 User's Guide (PDF) 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.
-
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 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 25.1.15 was last updated on January 15, 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.
- Removed RSS feed from web application. The improved URL formats and linking provide a more consistent method for creating custom reports.
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 the 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.
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
- 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.
- 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.