EPA Ireland Beach Water Quality

A Python project that queries the EPA Ireland Bathing Water API to retrieve the latest water quality measurements for Irish beaches. Includes a scheduled GitHub Action that automatically updates data for all monitored beaches 3 times daily.

Features

• Searches both in-season and out-of-season EPA measurement endpoints
• Paginates backwards from the most recent data for efficient searching
• Retrieves key water quality metrics including E.coli and Intestinal Enterococci levels
• Bulk fetches all 238 beaches concurrently and saves to a single JSON file
• GitHub Action runs automatically at 8am, 2pm and 8pm UTC daily
• latest_beaches.json is always up to date and publicly accessible via raw GitHub URL

Scripts

Script	Description
epa_beach_quality.py	Query a single beach by ID interactively
generate_beaches.py	Regenerate beaches.json from the EPA Locations API
update_all_beaches.py	Fetch latest data for all beaches and save to latest_beaches.json

Usage

Single beach lookup

Run the script and enter a beach ID when prompted:

python epa_beach_quality.py

Update all beaches

python update_all_beaches.py

Beach IDs for all monitored Irish beaches are listed in beaches.json.

Example output

Enter beach ID: IESWBWC090_0000_0300

Fetching latest measurement for beach ID: IESWBWC090_0000_0300...

Searching in-season (starting from page 241)...
  Found measurements on page 239
Searching out-season (starting from page 10)...
  No measurements found in out-season

Latest measurement for Garrylucas, White Strand:
  Beach ID:                    IESWBWC090_0000_0300
  Date:                        2025-09-01
  E.coli:                      31
  Intestinal Enterococci:      3
  Water Quality Status:        Excellent
  County:                      Cork
  Local Authority:             Cork County Council

Full record saved to: Garrylucas,_White_Strand_latest.json

How It Works

1. Fetches the total record count from both the in-season and out-of-season endpoints
2. Calculates the last page and searches backwards to find the most recent entry
3. Filters results by the provided beach ID and tracks the latest measurement by date
4. Prints a formatted summary and saves the full record as a JSON file

GitHub Action

A scheduled workflow runs update_all_beaches.py at 8am, 2pm and 8pm UTC daily and commits the updated latest_beaches.json to the repository automatically.

The latest data for all beaches is always available at:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/conor3618/epa-ie-water-quality-python/main/latest_beaches.json

beaches.json

beaches.json contains a full reference list of all EPA-monitored Irish beaches and their corresponding beach IDs. Use this file to look up the correct ID before running the script. To regenerate beaches.json with the latest EPA beach list, run generate_beaches.py.

Data Source

EPA Ireland (CC BY 4.0) EPA Ireland neither endorses this project nor guarantees data accuracy.

Licence

Code is licensed under the MIT License.