Real-time water quality data

Real-time water quality data

Good water quality is a basic requirement for communities and the environment. Councils are responsible for monitoring waterways to ensure that they meet legislated standards. Unfortunately, due to the costs of collecting data, waterways are usually only sampled every few months. A lot can happen between these visits, including floods and pollution from surrounding land and industry. The Quality Watch project provides a platform to detect these events in real time. It uses connected water quality instruments running on batteries in remote locations to measure turbidity, conductivity and temperature. The system provides data to the council via a dashboard. It is also a valuable test-bed for validating the performance of newly developed low-cost sensors. The development of a low-cost sensing system will enable more measurements in bushfire-damaged catchments to monitor their recovery.