Where PFAS Data Is, and Isn't

PFAS data means three different things, and they are not equally easy to find.

Monitoring results, PFAS measured in water, groundwater, sediment, soil and tissue, are public, spread across federal and state programs. We bring them into one inventory and keep each record's source.

Most of those observations are non-detects, more than eight in ten. A non-detect is a real measurement. It tells a model where PFAS is not.

What is thin is the site record: the soil reports that say how much PFAS is in the ground, and at what depth. A source term needs depth.

We searched agency repositories for more than six hundred military and AFFF installations. About one in ten had a publicly retrievable soil report with depth.

We assembled the ones we could recover into one soil inventory: more than thirty thousand depth-resolved records from one hundred forty-one agency sources.

The third kind is a screening layer: nearly two hundred thousand facilities where PFAS may have been used or released. They are potential sources, not confirmed contamination, and not an allegation about any facility.

Pick any watershed in the Explorer and the three sit together on one map, so you can see what is measured, what was recovered, and where our inventory has no record yet.

Where PFAS data is, and isn't, at swatgenx.com.