Why Instream Turbidity Monitoring?

Turbidity is the cloudiness or murkiness of water caused by suspended organic or inorganic materials. Turbidity in natural waters is recognized as an important indicator of its environmental health.

• Turbidity can be a good indication of impairments such as nutrients and e-coli, and is an excellent surrogate for suspended sediment concentration.
• Fish habitat is impacted by turbidity. Suspended particles absorb sunlight, raising the temperature of water which causes oxygen concentration to fall. Poor visibility also impedes feeding.
• Monitoring turbidity in a watershed permits preemptive response to water quality events which could otherwise put the public health in jeopardy. FTS' StreamWatch systems can be configured with flexible early warning detection capabilities to fire alarms via email or SMS messaging upon one or more conditions being met.
• Enables regulatory and compliance monitoring of NTU thresholds, TMDLs and BMPs.
• Permits monitoring impacts of land development and resource extraction, including adherence to the EPA’s new standards controlling the discharge of pollutants from construction sites. FTS' portable QD ("Quick Deploy") systems provide an ideal solution for temporary turbidity monitoring needs.
• Provides easy detection of contaminants due to stormwater runoff.
• Turbidity is very useful for triggering strategic, event-based automated sampling. Unlike stage or other measurements, an increase in turbidity is definitely indicative of an issue that should be sampled. Our SedEvent™ system is designed around this concept of turbidity threshold sampling.
• Continuous monitoring of turbidity captures far more temporal data to provide a far better characterization of turbidity changes over time than manual grab sampling.