Preparing for Another Field Trip

This week, we have continued our preparations for our next water quality sampling trip. The sampling trip is part of a supplemental proposal that Kim, a number of our colleagues, and I got funded to collect water quality data from freshwater inlets across the Mississippi Sound and throughout the Mississippi River and Bird's Foot Delta in lower Louisiana. Our plan is to head to the field every two months to collect data at sites within Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and while our lab collects data at a few Louisiana sites, all of the Mississippi River samples are collected by a colleague at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. Our first field trip in December was really a test of our proposed efforts. Was our sampling gear appropriate? Were the launch points correct? Can we do this research with only a few people in the field? We learned a lot from this initial trip and upon returning, we immediately made some adjustments which we will incorporate in a few weeks. 

Our newest task is to integrate our nitrate sensor onto the BlueBoat. The nitrate sensor requires a constant power source to collect data and unlike our water quality sensor, the nitrate sensor does not use a battery pack. Instead, we need to connect the sensor to external power, which we accomplished in December by connecting the sensor to a portable charger. This meant that we had the BlueBoat driving in front of us and we followed it while connected to the BlueBoat by the nitrate sensor's 25 meter cable. As you may imagine, however, this tethered system is quite cumbersome, as someone needs to maintain the cable while someone else is ready to manually control the BlueBoat if a problem arises, and possibly another team member to replace someone if they get tired. Instead what we are working on is creating an integrated power system so that the nitrate sensor draws power from within the BlueBoat and therefore is not tethered to the passenger boat. While a team member will still need to be ready with the manual controls if a problem arises, the integrated system will allow the passenger boat to travel to the midpoint of the BlueBoat's path and the team can conduct the vertical water quality profile while the BlueBoat is conducting the horizontal profile. Within the BlueBoat software, I can set a travel point if the boat loses connection with the computer, so we are going to test to see if the boat will travel to the midway point if we get too far away. If that is the case, then we may be able to set the BlueBoat to start its path and trek over to conduct the vertical profile even in our largest waterways, where the BlueBoat travels for nearly an hour to conduct its horizontal path.

We do go back in the field in just over a week, so I don't know how fast the integrated system will come together. Our backup is to use the same method from the December trip for this February trip and then get the integrated system completed by April. I'm hopeful, though, because our engineering team did a great job in designing systems to mount the sensors. Additionally, we will hopefully get some data from the vertical profiles soon so that we can address whether all the sites we are using are suitable for the work, whether we are perhaps sampling too many sites and can reduce our efforts (since some sites are different outlets of the same river), and so that our hydrodynamic modeling colleagues can start integrating these results into their work. 

I will hopefully bring back good pictures from the field this time so stay tuned for those!