March 22, 2014

World water day

World water day is held annually on the 22nd of March.

Water day focuses on how important freshwater is. This also stresses the importance on keeping it clean and conserving it. However keeping it clean and safe requires a lot of work, especially in this day and age where eutrophication is a household term. We want to ensure that the aquatic ecosystem is healthy. This means monitoring a myriad different parameters. Although it is intuitive to assume water is well mixed and measuring in a single localized place is sufficient, this is not the case. Levels of dissolved oxygen, pH, salinity and other variables can differ spatially quite significantly. Monitoring many different locations also allows determination of where contaminants are introduced (if any) into the water body which can greatly help to mitigate unwarranted discharges into water bodies.

Subnero Water Assessment Network (SWAN) is our solution for water quality monitoring. Each node (shaped like a swan) is mobile and carries probes for monitoring. When a fleet of swans are tasked with monitoring a water body they can intelligently plan optimal routes to gather data from all over the water body. The data is uploaded to the cloud in real-time. This allows scientists to remotely analyze the water quality. They can then make informed decisions and preemptively identify potential problems.