Basin-Scale, Real-Time Salinity Management Using Telemetered Sensor Networks and Model-Based Salt Assimilative Capacity Forecasts

Introduction

In the past five years there has been a revolution in the way individuals share information. Social networking software applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube continue to redefine the manner by which knowledge is acquired and shared. The US Environmental Protection Agency Office of Information Technology has suggested that the next five years will witness as significant a technical revolution in data sharing technologies as the past five have provided in the ability to search. As data sharing becomes more widespread a significant constraint to the use of the information acquired is the issue of data quality. Important decisions are often made on current or real-time data – which is why, in the past, agencies preferred to establish and maintain their own monitoring stations. However, scant attention and few resources have been devoted to sharing the data from these stations with others (Maidment, 2008; Tarboton, 2005).

The Consortium for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) has developed a Hydrologic Information System architecture in an attempt to address some of the obstacles associated with data sharing on the web (Maidment, 2008). Given the rapid increase in statutory environmental regulation during the past decade and the establishment of pollutant-load regulatory frameworks in many countries such as the TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) in the United States (California Environmental Protection Agency, 2002), stakeholders are being obligated to support the extensive monitoring networks needed to implement these pollutant control systems. Data sharing technologies and procedures for ensuring continuous data quality assurance are necessary for sustained and cost-effective watershed-based pollutant regulation. This paper describes a prototype data acquisition, sharing and data quality assurance project developed for salinity management within the San Joaquin Basin of California (Figure 1) that takes a first step at overcoming existing impediments. The paper provides detail on wetland salinity management since the 80,000 hectare project area to which these techniques are applied was without any form of continuous environmental monitoring as recently as eight years ago. The salinity control strategy taken to manage salt exports from these San Joaquin Basin wetlands is contrasted with the Basin salinity plan adopted for the significantly larger Murray Darling Basin in south-east Australia to contrast and compare the relative merits of each program.

Figure 1.

San Joaquin River Basin showing major primary real-time monitoring stations. The east-side of the Basin produces high quality return flows that derive from the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The west-side of the Basin produces return flows high in salt and trace elements resulting from the combination of an imported water supply and the natural salinity of the alluvial, marine-derived soils (source: California Department of Water Resources)