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Measuring the health of the sea
July 28, 2003Last summer Donostia City Council in the Basque Country installed a special buoy in the city's Concha Bay for the first time. The apparatus carried out analyses of the water quality in order to verify its suitability for bathing. This buoy was anchored at the bottom of the sea, halfway between the Santa Clara islet and the Concha and Ondarreta beaches. Now, a newly incorporated sensor that analyses the bacteriology of the water extends the analytical capacity of the buoy.
This buoy has been designed by the company URSAT in Langraiz, in collaboration with AZTI and INASMET technological centres.
The buoy is a veritable floating laboratory that takes in water, measures its physical & chemical properties such as turbidity, temperature, acidity and the amount of dissolved salt and oxygen, amongst other parameters. It carries out the analyses and sends the results by radio to a control centre in the Donostia aquarium. Moreover, it has a great variety of communications possibilities such as data transmission via GSM or by satellite. In this way, the water quality can be controlled continually in real time from the nearby Aquarium to such an extent that any change can be detected immediately.
But, the research is still going ahead. In the future, instead of the buoy having batteries, it will have solar panels which will mean the buoy will be an energetically autonomous floating laboratory.
The buoy will also contain a sensor for hydrocarbons which will be continually floating in the water. This sensor emits electromagnetic waves and, through electromagnetic differences, is able to detect if a film of hydrocarbons exists or not. This information is transmitted to a controler that warns us of the danger and raises the alarm at the control centre.
The buoy will also undertake other analyses. As a consequence of human presence on the coast, organic compounds are found in the sea and these can provoke a huge growth in algae. The new buoy will be able to measure the quantity of nutrients and algae in the sea.
Moreover, it will be able to make bacteriological measurements. Up to now, in order to measure the water quality, a boat left port approximately every fortnight in order to collect a sample of water which was then taken to the laboratory for analysis. Now, the new buoy can detect bacteria detrimental to human health such as, for example, those usually found in human excrement. The probe analysing this parameter will be suspended below the buoy, given that the sun's ultraviolet rays can kill the bacteria at the surface. Thus, these bacteria are more abundant at somewhat greater depths, precisely where the probe takes the sample.
With all this data, the buoy will transmit an on-going profile by satellite of the state of health of the water.
Elhuyar Fundazioa
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