Environmental Assessment > Marine Waters Home > PSAMP Monitoring > Why We Monitor

Why We Monitor

The Marine Waters Monitoring program is designed to measure ambient water quality conditions in Puget Sound and the coastal estuaries of Washington State. Long-term ambient monitoring data are needed to establish baseline conditions with the goal of detecting effects from human activities leading to contamination and/or habitat degradation.

Assessing Long-Term Water Quality

The long-term data collected as part of the PSAMP monitoring are used to assess marine water quality throughout Puget Sound, Willapa Bay, and Grays Harbor, with the intent of differentiating interannual and seasonal variation from variation due to human activities at specific locations. A major use of the data is for maintenance of the Federal Clean Water Act 303(d) list, a regulatory listing of impaired waterbodies throughout the state. Implementation of marine water quality management activities for Puget Sound and the outer coastal estuaries can be based, in part, on quantitative water quality data gathered by this monitoring program. The data are also used by interdisciplinary efforts aimed at assessing the health of marine ecosystem components, ranging from eelgrass to salmon, since these organisms live in and are affected by marine waters and its quality.

Monitoring for Success

To understand if our efforts to fix problems in Puget Sound are working, we need to know how things stand before we start. This idea is similar to having a routine check-up at the doctor so they know how your body is functioning before something happens. Some efforts to fix problems in Puget Sound could take a long time.  Long-term monitoring allows us to look at changes that will take a long time to see if corrective actions have worked. If we look over a large region of Puget Sound, we can measure the success of the many combined efforts to fix problems in that region (e.g. Hood Canal, South Sound). Global warming is a large scale problem that occurs over long time frames such as global warming. Is global warming impacting Puget Sound? Long-term monitoring data will help us answer this question.