Mobile unsupervised platform for real-time ocean water quality monitoring

Abstract

Increased population and industrial growth leaving serious impact on marine environment hence effective water quality monitoring for both fresh and seawaters is of high demand. Traditional water quality monitoring systems follow manual procedures like collecting water samples, testing and analyzing them in laboratories, which is not only costly but also time consuming, and ultimately effecting timely decision making. Due to recent advancements in sensor technology, sensor based environment systems are attracting the researchers and developers by offering several advantages as compared to traditional approaches. Benefiting from the technology, a multi-sensor marine platform, Mariner is developed. This Mariner has the ability to monitor a range of water quality parameters, collect and forward the retrieved data to processing center in real time in order to take timely decision. It has propulsion capability, hence can move from one location to another autonomously. The proposed system is equally suitable for small as well as large-scale water reservoirs like lakes, rivers, fishponds etc. thus promises broad applicability prospects. The real-time results of various monitoring parameters were obtained successfully when tested in Red Sea near Sharma beach while three-dimensional graphs are plotted to assess the influence of depth and time on the observed parameters.