Reading Water Quality Data from MWRD

Source: Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago http://www.mwrd.org/    > Reports   >   M&R Data and Reports   >   Water Quality Data   >   2014 Waterway Ambient Water Quality   >  Waterways_2014.xlsx

Data Transformation: I created a data table for analysis.  See SQL code.

Data Analysis: Printed summary statistics and K means cluster analysis results for January, 2014 in R.  See R code.

Summary:

• The average temperature of the waterways in January, 2014 was 4.79 degrees celsius.
• The average pH was 6.92.
• The average Total Dissolved Solids was 1141.86 mg/L.

Of these three measures of water quality, only Total Dissolved Solids appears to be normally distributed across the survey points.

I ran a K means cluster analysis with three clusters on the three variables (in R).

This is a summary table for k means cluster analysis with three clusters for TDS:

Location	Measured Value	Cluster	Cluster Average
North Branch Chicago River at Albany Ave	1552	Cluster 1	1560.0
Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal at Cicero Ave	1132	Cluster 2	1159.5
Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal at Harlem Ave	1276	Cluster 2	1159.5
North Branch Chicago River at Diversey Ave	1196	Cluster 2	1159.5
North Shore Channel at Touhy Ave	1054	Cluster 2	1159.5
South Fork South Branch Chicago River at Archer Ave	1080	Cluster 2	1159.5
Chicago River Main Stem at Wells St	668	Cluster 3	793.0
Higgins Creek at Wille Rd	808	Cluster 3	793.0
Little Calumet River at Halsted St	840	Cluster 3	793.0
South Branch Chicago River at Loomis St	856	Cluster 3	793.0