ABOUT

The National Water and Sanitation Agency of Brazil (ANA) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have had a long-lasting partnership since 2014. The partnership has focused on capacity building in water resource assessments and has led to great advances in several areas including equipment and procedures used for water and evapotranspiration monitoring, quality assurance of data, and water quality modeling.

Cooperation between ANA and USGS has led to significant advances in water quality modeling, including the development of a new open-source modeling and interactive decision support systems within the SPAtially Referenced Regressions on Watershed attributes (SPARROW) model and application of the improved model to understand water quality in Brazil. SPARROW was developed by the USGS to model water quality at a regional scale and was migrated to the R language, now called R-SPARROW, as part of this work.