Hudson River to get 24/7 scrutiny

A new network of sensors will detail how ecological threats to the waterway affect the seacoast.

from the September 5, 2007 edition

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Last month, the project passed a milestone when the Beacon Institute and IBM announced an agreement under which IBM will provide the data-processing system to gather and analyze vast amounts of video, acoustic, and other data as it arrives from sensors.

The idea of monitoring river flow or taking sediment samples is hardly new, acknowledges Oscar Schofield, a Rutgers University professor who works on ocean-observing networks. But the efforts often are piecemeal.

Far more is needed, he says, including networks that run continuously and reach far into the surrounding watershed, to truly understand how a river works as a system.

For instance, scientists are trying to establish better ways to estimate such basic features as how changes in flow rate affect changes in sediment levels the river carries. Municipal water-supply managers are keenly interested in such mundane things because it affects the type of purification strategies they need to employ, especially if upstream sediments contain contaminants.

Nailing down that relationship is "one of those holy grail-type items," says Rocky Geyer, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Scientists have a basic mathematical rule of thumb they use to relate sediment loads to flows. But it takes long-term, detailed monitoring of five-, 10-, or 100-year floods to test how well that relationship holds up under extreme events.

Shipping companies also are excited by the prospect of having the network in place, adds Dr. Schofield, because they feel they often get blamed for dumping pollutants that may have come from elsewhere. A dense network of sensors could help determine if raw sewage in the water may in fact come from a nearby broken main, rather than from a ship's sanitary tanks.

Indeed, Schofield says, one of the challenges for the Hudson project will involve figuring out how to add what he calls the "human box" to the many other factors affecting the river – an ability to track and eventually model human interactions with the Hudson. The results would be blended with those from other biological, chemical, and physical calculations that simulations of the river would require. "If we're able to do that in 20 years," he says, "that would fundamentally change how we view our Earth and our world."

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