What is water quality monitoring?
Water quality monitoring involves tracking a range of factors that may impact a particular water environment (e.g. ocean, river, estuary, lake, any other body of water), including temperature, salinity, turbidity, light levels, sedimentation and more.
Water quality monitoring often aims to identify the short- and long-term impacts of acute environmental events. These may be human-led events, such as maritime or agricultural work, or extreme climatic conditions that have resulted in environmental disturbances.
At Trinity, water quality monitoring is undertaken by a team of qualified scientists and experienced marine and freshwater professionals.
Who needs water quality monitoring?
Water quality monitoring is typically undertaken by organisations that are operating in or around marine or freshwater environments.
Common examples include resource companies transporting bulk commodities to and from export ports, port authorities conducting regular business or undertaking dredging campaigns, local councils, and developers executing or pursuing projects adjacent to aquatic areas.
Trinity has undertaken water quality monitoring for a range of organisations including:
- Local councils
- State and federal government departments
- Port authorities
- Resource and mining companies
- Developers
- Coastal management, protection and research organisations and not-for-profits.
Why Choose Trinity
- 24/7 real-time data via customised online dashboard
- In-house research team develops custom equipment for targeted monitoring tasks
- Innovative solutions that integrate new ideas with proven approaches
Trinity capabilities
Trinity develops monitoring plans and undertakes regular, ad hoc and project-specific water quality monitoring in a range of environments.
Monitoring plans and scheduled monitoring
- Monitoring the short- and long-term impacts of acute environmental events
- Continuous and discrete water quality monitoring options
- Design, implementation and reporting of ambient and compliance water quality monitoring plans (WQMP) and receiving environment monitoring plans (REMP)
Project- and purpose-specific monitoring and compliance reporting
- Construction (including capital and maintenance dredge) monitoring and compliance reporting
Real-time data and online dashboards
- Telemetered data automatically deconfounded via a real-time SMART algorithm in our cloud databases
- Ability to view updated data after every field reading via a customised secure project dashboard
- Data automatically compared to trigger values and alerts sent to custom lists
- Real-time meteorological data and vessel movements linked to dashboard
- Customised daily email report, which is suitable for viewing by regulators, if desired
- Greater than 98% validated data recovery rate for telemetered physicochemical data from more than 70 individual sites over periods up to four years
Our equipment and technology
We build customised water quality monitoring stations for each client and project.
Our monitoring stations can be telemetered (real-time data provision) or autonomously logging. Stations can be located anywhere, including between the water column surface to the seabed. Using our modular buoys, a variety of different loggers and parameters can be measured including:
- Physicochemical parameters, such as temperature, pH, salinity/conductivity, dissolved oxygen and turbidity
- Photosynthetic active radiation (PAR)
- Waves and ADCP features, such as currents, turbulence and acoustic scattering
- Depth and atmospheric pressure
- Sedimentation (benthic stations).
How we work
Our team of full-time research staff, certified coxswains and marine professionals use dedicated laboratory facilities, specialised field equipment and a fleet of commercial vessels to provide readily mobilised field technical services.
We are also experts in data. Project managers rely upon our user-friendly, cloud-based software solutions that facilitate 24/7 proactive environmental management.
Our in-house expertise and equipment mean we are in a strong position to respond quickly if incidents occur. And our professional service allows organisations to take prompt and comprehensive action in response to any environmental concerns, which can be vital in a) minimising potential environmental harm and b) subsequently demonstrating to regulators that all possible responses were deployed. We work closely with in-house teams to tailor an approach and design a mitigation and remediation solution to suit your needs.
