On Becoming a Sensor Connoisseur: Lessons on Discriminating When High Frequency Data Are Desirable
Abstract
The rapid emergence and adoption of in situ high frequency water quality sensors is rightly hailed as transformative for watershed science and limnology. New time series of water chemistry that reveal variation at sub-hourly time scales enables a new suite of inferences about system functions and human impacts. From catchment science, where imprinting of in-stream storage has been revealed by high resolution measurements, to river ecosystems, where chemical patterns with daily and event-driven rhythms indicate the integral role of biota in solute dynamics, there is a long and growing list of reasons to use sensors to better understand our aquatic ecosystems. However, like many technological advances, there are trade-offs that arise from the deployment and interpretation of in situ sensors. After describing some of the recent sensor-derived epiphanies, this talk takes a more critical view of the utilization of sensors. We focus, in particular, on the costs of sensor deployments, which are necessarily time consuming, and, for many sensors, extremely expensive. The opportunity costs with respect to measuring water quality are real, particularly for understanding and managing large river basins. In the spirit of cultivating conoisseurs of water quality measurement, we consider a rigorous approach to establishing where sensor measurements are integral to new understanding, and where they may be counterproductive.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B53D..01C
- Keywords:
-
- 0414 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0439 Ecosystems;
- structure and dynamics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0452 Instruments and techniques;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1895 Instruments and techniques: monitoring;
- HYDROLOGY