Water Quality Monitoring
The fresh water system is a complex dynamic system comprising catchment areas, aquifers, rivers, lakes and recycled water. Wireless sensor networks offer a tool for integrated monitoring of all aspects of the water system, thus providing water resource managers with the information they need to secure high-quality drinking water which is vital for healthy living. We are developing and field-testing new sensor nodes and networking technologies that will enable versatile, scalable, and robust sensor networks for water management applications.
Monitoring water quality in Lake Wivenhoe
CSIRO has partnered with Seqwater, the local water authority for the south-east Queensland region, to develop Australia’s largest integrated intelligent wireless sensor network for monitoring drinking water.
Lake Wivenhoe is one of the major sources of drinking water for south-east Queensland. Its catchment spans an area about the size of the city of Brisbane and supplies water to the region’s 1.5 million residents.
A network of over 100 nodes using CSIRO's Fleck™ smart wireless sensor network technology are being deployed to monitor environmental conditions on Lake Wivenhoe and in the surrounding catchment.
The network will provide a cost-effective way of integrating different measures such as water quality, event flows, weather, and pasture conditions as well as the movement of cattle in the catchment. This will provide Seqwater with the capacity to monitor the effect of 'events' in real-time, such as high rainfall, droughts, or contaminants entering the waterway.
Forty five floating nodes have been operating on the lake since November 2008, measuring water temperature at varying depths. A further 25 land-based nodes are currently being installed throughout the surrounding catchment region to measure microclimate (air temperature, humidity, soil moisture, wind speed, and wind direction). The next stage of deployment in mid 2009 will see the addition of a further 30 nodes in the form of collars worn by cows grazing in the catchment area (for more information refer to our related research on the applications of Sensor Networks in Agriculture). All the nodes operate in a meshed network, meaning that they cooperate with each other to set up an ad hoc network to wirelessly transfer data back to a central point for collection and analysis.
CSIRO has also designed and built an autonomous solar-powered catamaran that travels between the floating nodes gathering data. During normal operation the boat runs autonomously, visiting each of the nodes in turn to calibrate their temperature sensors using a retractable underwater arm. As it travels between sensor nodes on lake, the boat take readings of water quality, temperature, bathymetry (depth sounding), as well as performing shore-line mapping. A laser sensor mounted above the boat enables it to avoid obstacles or running into the shoreline, and keeps it out of shallow water.
The catamaran can also be manually directed through a PDA, web interface, or web-enabled mobile phone, giving a water manager in the Brisbane CBD the ability to collect specific data about the water storage without the need to travel to the location. The boat can also be tasked with missions by the network itself, whereby if the network of floating nodes detects an anomalous 'event' (such as a localised rise in water temperature which may indicate the presence of a contaminant) it can autonomously advise the boat to sample in that region in more detail.
Contacts
Publications
- Matt Dunbabin, James Udy, Alistair Grinham, and Michael Bruenig. "Continous Monitoring of Reservoir Water Quality: The Wivenhoe Project", Journal of the Australian Water Association, Volume 36, No 6. Sep 2009.
- Tuan Led Dinh, Wen Hu, Pavan Sikka, Peter Corke, Leslie Overs, Stephen Brosnan. "Design and Deployment of a Remote Robust Sensor Network: Experiences from an Outdoor Water Quality Monitoring Network." Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Workshop on Piratical Issues in Building Sensor Network Applications (SenseApp), Dublin, Ireland, Oct., 2007.
