The Oil Pollution Act authorizes certain federal agencies, states, and Indian tribes —collectively known as natural resource trustees— to evaluate the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill on natural resources. These trustees are responsible for studying the effects of the spill through a process known as Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA). As part of this process, scientists work together to identify potential injuries to natural resources and lost human uses resulting from the spill.
This website is the public NOAA repository for data related to the DWH Trustees' NRDA efforts. To provide additional context to the NRDA data, the site also includes historical (pre-2010) contaminant chemistry data for the onshore area of the Gulf of Mexico, as well as contaminant chemistry data collected during the Response efforts and by BP. These data are available to the general public and are accessed through a query and mapping interface called DIVER (Data Integration Visualization Exploration and Reporting) Explorer. Trustee NRDA data currently available include photographs, telemetry, field observations, instrument data, and results of laboratory analysis on tissue, sediment, oil, and water samples. Data can be viewed onscreen or downloaded in a variety of formats.