How to Monitor Water Quality at Multiple Sites in a Large Area
Posted by
Dan Aven on Tue, Oct 11, 2011 @ 01:50 PM
Monitoring water quality is an essential need in many government agencies and municipalities.
Whether it’s looking at the water quality of drinking water intakes, run off from storm events, or pollution during construction projects, frequent water quality data can act as an early warning system allowing quick responses to these events. In some cases, manual grab samples may be enough to monitor the sites in question, but usually a real-time monitoring system can be very useful. What if you had multiple sites that needed this real-time monitoring across a city or county?
The City of Kissimmee, roughly 13 square miles, wanted to get a handle on the water quality and pollutants throughout the city limits. They identified 20 locations where they wanted to measure several parameters such as Dissolved Oxygen ( DO ), Turbidity, and pH. At 11 of 20 sites, they wanted stage and velocity data as well. This would give them an excellent picture of the water quality, but unless the data was delivered in real time, there was no way it could be used as a warning system, alerting them to pollution events.
The solution was an integrated system from YSI along with continual services for ongoing 
calibrations and maintenance. Each of the 20 stations included a YSI sonde to measure Dissolved Oxygen ( DO ), Turbidity, pH, and level every 15 minutes, a rain gauge, a battery and solar panel, and an EcoNet environmental datalogger. 11 of the stations also included a SonTek / YSI Argonaut®- SL (side-looking) to provide the flow and velocity data. The monitoring stations each have samplers that will automatically collect a water sample when the rain gauge shows a rainfall event. This allows further laboratory testing for important parameters like metals, nutrients, and bacteria.
The EcoNet is the key to making the real-time monitoring work across a large area like the City of Kissimmee. The EcoNet is designed to be a simple and easy to install data to the web environmental datalogger. The EcoNet logs data from the YSI sonde, the Sontek Argonaut, and the rain gauge storing data for Dissolved Oxygen, Turbidity, pH, level, rain, flow, and velocity. Via cellular telemetry, each EcoNet pushes the data to the EcoNet website where data is displayed. The EcoNet software allows for the customer to make the data available to a public website and / or a private site.
Benefits of a real-time network of water quality monitoring systems
- Real-time water quality results can provide an alert system for events such as floods and storms - flood alert system and stormwater monitoring system
- Cost reduction by reducing the number of manual grab samples and labor hours traveling to multiple sites to collect water samples
- Automation at a high level
- Optionally, produces public data for water quality and improves public-private relationship
- Allows employees to view real-time data from anywhere including from the field with a web browser enabled mobile phone.