Last week (October 6-7, 2010) was the biennial Illinois Water conference, hosted by the Illinois Water Resources Center at UI. There were sessions covering a large variety of issues important to Illinois, from green infrastructure to climate change to Asian Carp. There were a few sessions on water quality. I gave a talk on chloride in Illinois waters on October 7.

Several of the talks were given by scientists at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRDGC). Because the wastewater generated in MWRDGC plants is discharged to streams, rivers, and canals in the Chicago region, they are responsible for monitoring the water quality of the receiving water bodies. They have a huge number of stations, over 50 in the Chicago region I think, and one of their monitoring programs samples the Illinois River all the way to Peoria. A couple of the MWRDGC talks focused on dissolved oxygen (DO) data. They have 32 stations where they are taking hourly DO, temperature, and specific conductance measurements. I had no idea they all these data. As specific conductance is directly correlated with chloride concentrations, I hope to get some of these data. The amount of data MWRDGC has collected (dating back to the mid-1970s) is staggering, much of it available on their web site. Not just nutrients, but many other parameters. There are also water quality data for discharge from the treatment plants and the deep tunnel storm water detention system.

In another talk it was reported that the water treatment plant has daily nitrate data for the Vermilion River as far back as 1988. I wonder how many other water plants taking water from rivers and reservoirs have data of that sort? I have a pretty good handle of groundwater quality data in the state (although I’m sure there are lots of data from treatment plants I haven’t seen), but I’m just beginning to find out how much surface water quality data there are.

Here’s a link to the conference, and a link to the abstract for my talk.