Water Quality Monitoring
MScience offer the following routine monitoring services for water quality. For specific studies of water chemistry that relate to outfall discharges or potential pollution issues, see our Studies page.
- Design, deployment and management of telemetered instruments for the real-time monitoring of water quality characteristics. Includes data management, interpretation and reporting.
- Continuous in situ monitoring of light, turbidity, temperature in remote marine locations. Includes data recovery and instrument maintenance.
- Boat-based water quality assessment campaigns to quantify relationships between turbidity, light attenuation, suspended sediment concentrations and remote imaging (eg MODIS). Spatial and temporal variation in metal, nutrients and other water quality characteristics.
Projects
- Woodside Pluto – Long term monitoring of water quality throughout almost 3 years of dredging, using real-time telemetered instrumentation and logging instruments. The continuous monitoring at 25 sites in and around Mermaid Sound represents the largest water quality monitoring program completed on the North-West Shelf and the first successful use of telemetered systems in the region.
- Chevron Wheatstone – Design of baseline water quality monitoring together with a complementary boat based program. Baseline includes long term continuous monitoring of water quality around sensitive coral receptor sites. The boat based program has established and quantified relationships between various water quality characteristics and has been used to assess water quality through calibration of MODIS imagery.
- Chevron Gorgon – Provided independent assessment of instrument options for telemetered turbidity measurement and ongoing oversight role in the design, manufacture, delivery, deployment and data management from these instruments for this project.
Technical Information
Our experience shows that there is a large range of performance from instruments sold to do apparently simple tasks. However, data quality returns from field instrumentation are only as good as the calibration, maintenance and quality control applied in the field, laboratory and office.
We frequently work with instrument manufacturers, such as Fastwave, to develop specialised instruments for monitoring water.
At present, we are working on the design and deployment of instruments which minimise the need for support from in-water divers.