Waterbody Advisories

You can use the Waterbody Advisory System when planning recreational activities on New York City Waterways other than beaches. It uses water quality models and real-time rainfall data to provide detailed advisory durations. The Waterbody Advisory System:

• Reports advisories for 45 individual waterbodies citywide
• Uses 10-years of hourly modeled bacterial data to project when and for how long a waterbody is likely to exceed its bacterial limit based on real-time rainfall data from rain gauges at all 14 Wastewater Resource Recovery Facilities
• Follows New York State’s waterbody reclassification and adopted bacteria criteria for primary and second contact recreation*

Access the Waterbody Advisory System

For beach information, visit NYC Beach Water Quality. To learn more about ways we are improving water quality in New York City, visit Combined Sewer Overflows.

If you detect any problems with the Waterbody Advisory System, please email ltcp@dep.nyc.gov. You can also sign up for waterbody alerts at NotifyNYC.

*The applicable enterococcus water quality standard for primary contact waterbodies is an Enterococcus statistical threshold value (STV) of 130 cfu/100 ml, and for secondary contact waterbodies is an Enterococcus STV of 266 cfu/100 ml.