Tetra Tech provided the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) full software development life cycle support for the planning, analysis, design, building, and implementation of the Surface Water Quality Management Information System (SWQMIS). This web-based system was successfully deployed in January 2007 at TCEQ’s production server environment and has been used since then by TCEQ personnel as an essential component of their business workflow for managing ambient water quality monitoring data.

In August 2007, Tetra Tech has successfully completed additional SWQMIS modules that (1) extended the systems analytical capabilities to support TCEQ’s core mandate to assess the water quality conditions of all its water resources (rivers, lakes, etc.); and (2) allows TCEQ to submit data to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) via EPA’s central data exchange node using XML and web services technology. Tetra Tech conducted training courses for TCEQ and its data partners (laboratories, regional water authorities, the U.S. Geological Survey [USGS] and other agencies) to facilitate the transition of the end users to the new system.

SWQMIS is equipped with several features, including:

• Consolidated and centralized database containing a variety of water quality data types
• Custom interfaces for manual and consistent data entry of all types of data
• Mass data loaders from various data sources
• Database administrator interfaces that allow an administrator to manage users and security and to provide online maintenance tools used to manage reference data
• Integration with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to allow map-based creation of sites, automatically assigning geographic attributes
• Public access that allows the public and other organizations to retrieve water quality data
• Change tracking including the “history” of changes to values of selected database elements
• Reports and data extractions available in HTML, CSV, and/or pipe delimited (text) format
• Suite of analytical and assessment tools integrated with SAS software to summarize data, calculate various statistics, and provide reports for assessors
• Electronic data transfer module that streamlines submission of electronic data to EPA