Adjusting the Frequency of Automated Phosphorus Measurements to Environmental Conditions

Abstract

Extreme weather events are likely to increase in the future, and thus damage to the environment and infrastructure will likely increase during this time, too. To adapt to these weather impacts, forecasting, now-casting, and in situ monitoring installations have increased during the last years. Even though monitoring stations deliver frequent measurements in realtime, a dynamic implementation of measurement frequencies, adapted to certain environmental conditions, are rarely implemented. Within this paper we provide a framework where low frequency phosphorus measurements in the Mondsee catchment can be adapted to high frequency measurements during storm events. When heavy rainfall is observed, a threshold event triggers a reconfiguration task for the phosphorus measurement device, using asynchronous, push-based communication. A Sensor Planning Service commits such a request into the wireless sensor network, and updates the measurement frequency of the target nodes to enable nutrient peak flow estimation during storm events. This setup introduces the possibility of measurements in flooded areas without using traditional (manual) sampling methods, and we expect to obtain a better understanding of discharge to phosphorus runoff relations.

Do current European lake monitoring programmes reliably estimate phytoplankton community changes?

“…The P t load to Lake Mondsee can be calculated using various models (Strauss & Staudinger, 2007;Klug & Zeil, 2008). However, these models can only give a vague estimation of the true P t input, as they do not sufficiently take into account seasonal varying phosphorus sources from agricultural used land or snowmelt (Kerschbaumer, 2014;Klug et al, 2015). The measured SRP values were higher during the heavy rain event on 30 March 2015 compared to the heavy rain event on 02 February 2016.…”