EA Bathing Water Quality MCP Server

EA Bathing Water Quality

The Environment Agency Bathing Water Quality API provides data on designated bathing waters in England including compliance classifications, sample results, risk predictions, and site profiles.

Data Model

• Bathing Waters — ~400 designated bathing sites monitored annually. Each has a unique EU bathing water ID (eubwidNotation) like ukc2102-03600 and a sampling point ID (the last numeric segment, e.g. 03600).
• Compliance Assessments — Annual water quality classification under the revised Bathing Water Directive (rBWD): Excellent (1), Good (2), Sufficient (3), Poor (4). Based on 4-year rolling statistics of E. coli and intestinal enterococci samples.
• In-Season Samples — Individual water quality measurements taken during the bathing season (May–September). Each sample records E. coli and intestinal enterococci bacterial counts.
• Profiles — Annual descriptive profiles for each bathing water with beach descriptions, applicable year, and version tracking.
• Risk Predictions — Short-term pollution risk predictions (normal/increased/decreased) based on weather and environmental models.

Key Patterns

• Use _pageSize and _page (0-based) when stepping through long site lists.
• Site IDs use the EU bathing water ID notation (eubwidNotation) like ukc2102-03600.
• Sampling point IDs are the numeric suffix of the eubwid (e.g. 03600 from ukc2102-03600).
• Compliance reads are keyed by sampling point id the tools surface—match that id to the assessment tooling, not a free-text search.
• Payloads wrap list vs single-item results differently; inspect the first response to see whether you have an array or a primary topic object.

Gotchas

• No auth: Open data—still keep request volume reasonable.
• Filter shape: Deeply dotted parameter names are brittle; prefer the id/path arguments each tool documents.
• Linked data values: Strings may arrive as objects carrying _value, _datatype, and _lang—read _value for the plain text.
• Bathing season only: In-season samples are only collected May–September.
• Profiles need full eubwid: Use the full EU bathing water ID, not just the point number.

Typical workflow

1. List designated bathing sites to obtain EU bathing water IDs (eubwidNotation) and sampling point suffixes.
2. Fetch site detail or beach profile for a chosen eubwid.
3. List compliance assessments (optionally filtered by sampling point id) or in-season sample results.