A Mobile Canoe-Mounted, Geo-referenced, 3-D Water Quality Analyzer

Water quality analysis is vital to ensure the health of water sources, as well as identifying pollutants and modeling how they affect a river system. Current methods of collecting water samples consist of stationary samplers that measure changes in water quality at only one location over time. We have designed a mobile, canoe-mounted, water quality analyzing system that will enable researchers to efficiently collect a large number of water quality samples with an associated GPS location and depth for each data point. While the canoe travels in parallel swaths bank to bank, the unit will alternately collect samples from 3 different depths: 20, 10, and 2 ft. The system measures water quality in multiple cross sections to acquire an adequate representation of how water quality changes across and below the surface of a river. A pumping system with incorporated solenoid valves aboard the canoe conveys each water sample to a water quality sonde for analysis. The sonde is capable of analyzing a sample in-situ for five parameters: temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, electrical conductivity, and turbidity. With the water quality values and geo-referenced locations, we can develop multiple three-dimensional value maps of a river, illustrating spatial distribution of water quality.