The Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health (BEACH) Act was passed by Congress in 2000 to protect public health in coastal recreational waters. It established uniform criteria for testing, monitoring and notifying the public users of possible coastal recreation water problems. It also requires that states, in cooperation with EPA, develop and implement a program to monitor, for pathogens and pathogen indicators, coastal recreation waters adjacent to beaches that are used by the public and to notify the public if water quality standards for pathogens and pathogen indicators are exceeded. In July 2001, the Office of the Governor appointed the Texas General Land Office (GLO) as the lead state agency responsible for implementing the provisions of the BEACH Act, as they applied to the state, because of its existing Beach Watch Program. This program started in the late 1990s as a fledgling water-quality monitoring program funded by the Coastal Management Program. 

The Texas Beach Watch (TBW) program currently monitors water quality at more than 172 beach sites for Enterococcus bacteria. Following the successful development, deployment and evaluation of the AI-enabled Enterococcus predictor (ePredictor) presented at GOMCON 2024, GLO and the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi expanded the system to support statewide operational use.

In this phase, the project scaled predictive modeling from the original 15 test locations to all monitored beach sites along the Texas coast. The modeling framework continues to utilize Univariate and Multivariate Multi-Step configurations, incorporating additional environmental variables, including precipitation, alongside previously used inputs such as salinity and water temperature. To further strengthen predictive skill, the project also evaluated additional algorithms such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Random Forest.

As part of efforts to improve public accessibility and decision-support capabilities, an interactive statewide heat map was developed to highlight high-alert locations in real-time. The ePredictor iOS application has been released with integrated prediction and heat-map features, and an Android version is currently undergoing testing. Ongoing work includes implementing automated alert emails that notify subscribed users when conditions at selected beach sites indicate elevated bacterial risk.

This presentation will summarize the statewide deployment, expanded modeling approaches, and new user-oriented tools designed to accelerate the delivery of beach water-quality information to agencies and stakeholders.