AquaCheck

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  Landing Page

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  Result page

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  Water quality indicators

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  recommendation

Inspiration

Access to safe drinking water is something most New Yorkers take for granted, yet very few people understand what actually goes into measuring water quality. We were inspired by the availability of NYC Open Data and wanted to transform raw water quality measurements into something understandable and useful for everyday residents.

Instead of looking at complicated spreadsheets, we wanted users to easily explore water quality indicators like pH level, turbidity, chlorine, and bacteria levels through a simple web application.

Our goal was to make public water quality data transparent, interactive, and accessible.

What it does

Our project is a web application that allows users to explore NYC drinking water quality data in an interactive way.

Users can:

View water quality indicators such as pH level, turbidity, chlorine, and bacteria levels

Explore measurements from different sampling sites

Track how water quality changes over time

Visualize data instead of reading raw tables

The application makes complex environmental data easier to understand through simple visualizations.

How we built it

We built the project using the NYC Open Data Drinking Water Quality Distribution Monitoring dataset provided by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).

First, we cleaned and processed the data by handling missing values and formatting measurements into usable numeric values.

We then connected the sampling data with sampling site information to make the data more meaningful.

The web application was developed using:

NYC Open Data datasets

Python / JavaScript for data processing

Data visualization libraries for charts

A simple web framework to build the interface

The application allows users to filter and explore water quality data dynamically.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was working with real-world public data, which required cleaning and formatting before it could be used.

Another challenge was understanding the meaning of the different water quality measurements and how they should be interpreted.

We also had to connect sample site codes to actual locations, which required combining multiple datasets.

Time constraints during the hackathon made it challenging to implement all the features we initially planned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we successfully transformed a large and complex dataset into a working interactive web application.

We built a system that makes NYC water quality data easier to explore and understand.

We also successfully integrated multiple datasets and created meaningful visualizations within a short period of time.

What we learned

Through this project we learned:

How to work with real-world environmental data

How to clean and prepare open datasets

How to build a data-driven web application

How to visualize complex datasets in a simple way

How to collaborate efficiently under hackathon time pressure

This project helped us understand the importance of making public data accessible and useful.

What's next for AquaCheck

In the future, we would like to expand this project by:

Adding a map-based visualization of sampling locations

Including real-time or more frequent data updates

Adding more environmental datasets

Building automated alerts for unusual water measurements

Providing neighborhood-level water quality summaries

Built With

• nextjs
• python