- water
- permitting
- records
A discharge monitoring report is the periodic (usually monthly) filing in which an NPDES permittee reports its measured effluent — flow, concentrations, and loads — against each permit limit. It is a self-report, but a federally enforceable one: a false or omitted DMR is itself a violation.
The DMR is the workhorse record of water compliance. Because the reports are public and machine-readable through EPA's ECHO, they let an outside analyst reconstruct a facility's compliance history without a records request — recurring exceedances are what tip a permittee into significant non-compliance. For the platform they are a source of reported quantities: a DMR value is [verified] as filed, while any figure derived from it (a load trend, an annual mass) is an [inference] built on top.