How are drifting sensors used to study the salt content and pollution in California's Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta?
How are drifting sensors used to study the salt content and pollution in California's Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta?
Learn about how drifting sensors are used to collect data on water salinity and pollution in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, California.
Displayed by permission of The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Transcript
ANDREW TINKA: Clean fresh water is one of our most critical resources. Everybody needs drinking water. The Floating Sensor Network gives us a new tool for understanding how we can manage this precious resource.
Traditionally people build stationary sensors. They build places on the side of the river that measure things. They watch the water go by. Our perspective, our approach, is to put our sensor into the river and let it float with the river so that it traces where the water moves as it goes through rivers and estuaries and deltas. We need to know where the water goes, and we need to know how it carries things through the delta--how it carries salt water, how it carries pollution. We need to know these things so that we can make environmental-management decisions about where the water should go and how we can manage the delta. And then we'll watch which way they go into the Georgiana or the Sacramento River.
Floating sensors allow us to trace the movement of packets of water through the system so that we can understand where the salt water goes and where the fresh water goes, how they meet, how they mix, and where they end up. We throw 100 of these sensors in, and they transmit their location back to us, so we can watch them moving through the delta. And because they're carried by the water, where they're going is where the water is going. Every drifter tells us the time when it records, a GPS location, and the position that it was in when it recorded that information. When the experiment is complete, we gather them all up, take them home, and work with the data to build a picture of what's happening in the delta.
Inside we have a little bit of ballast, a battery so that it lasts a long time, and a cell phone. We wrote an Android app that runs on the smartphone, gathers the GPS position, and transmits it back to our servers. We also have sensors that contain water-quality sensors themselves that measure the salt content or the pollution content of the water directly. We can find out which areas threaten our freshwater supply before a catastrophe occurs. This tool will give managers better information so that they can make better decisions about how to take care of our freshwater resources in a way that satisfies everyone.
Traditionally people build stationary sensors. They build places on the side of the river that measure things. They watch the water go by. Our perspective, our approach, is to put our sensor into the river and let it float with the river so that it traces where the water moves as it goes through rivers and estuaries and deltas. We need to know where the water goes, and we need to know how it carries things through the delta--how it carries salt water, how it carries pollution. We need to know these things so that we can make environmental-management decisions about where the water should go and how we can manage the delta. And then we'll watch which way they go into the Georgiana or the Sacramento River.
Floating sensors allow us to trace the movement of packets of water through the system so that we can understand where the salt water goes and where the fresh water goes, how they meet, how they mix, and where they end up. We throw 100 of these sensors in, and they transmit their location back to us, so we can watch them moving through the delta. And because they're carried by the water, where they're going is where the water is going. Every drifter tells us the time when it records, a GPS location, and the position that it was in when it recorded that information. When the experiment is complete, we gather them all up, take them home, and work with the data to build a picture of what's happening in the delta.
Inside we have a little bit of ballast, a battery so that it lasts a long time, and a cell phone. We wrote an Android app that runs on the smartphone, gathers the GPS position, and transmits it back to our servers. We also have sensors that contain water-quality sensors themselves that measure the salt content or the pollution content of the water directly. We can find out which areas threaten our freshwater supply before a catastrophe occurs. This tool will give managers better information so that they can make better decisions about how to take care of our freshwater resources in a way that satisfies everyone.