ACASAK Consulting has been supporting a joint project with Mass Bays and SeaTrac to test the water quality monitoring capabilities of SeaTrac's autonomous vessel. Mass Bays is interested in studying changes in water quality that could help explain the losses of eelgrass that have occurred over the last 60 years in Plymouth Bay and Duxbury Bay. SeaTrac's autonomous vessel was outfitted with a multi-parameter sonde and then programmed to autonomously navigate the bays collecting continuous water quality data. We are collecting salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll-a, and turbidity. The SeaTrac vessel has the ability to follow a pre-programmed route to within a few meters, and it sends data in real time back to a computer on land. We tested the vessel several times during 2018 on a long full circuit of the bays. Next we are planning to deploy it in a smaller area but for a longer period of time for several days of repeating circuits.
Samples of data collected:
