Real

Real-time Environmental Monitoring: A Geo-referenced Survey Boat for Gulf Coast Waters

Project Summary

Episodic particle events occur randomly in the Gulf of Mexico. With the current sampling paradigms, these ecological events are not being properly monitored. This is because as episodic events occur, ecological systems change in pulsed responses and current institutional sampling is infrequent and at fixed locations. It is necessary to have a mobile platform that can monitor in real-time and log the data that is being collected as the particle events take place. By mounting several water quality sensors onto a geo-referenced boat, changes in various water parameters will be detected, monitored, and displayed in real-time so that researchers will be able to make insightful predictions and also observe long-term ecological trends. This mobile platform will dramatically change the sampling regimes that are currently used and introduce a new sampling paradigm called “smart sampling” based on in-situ, real-time monitoring.