Hydrologic monitoring: The third wave

Abstract

Surface and groundwater monitoring have gone through development stages that involved manual and mechanical techniques and are now being revolutionized by microelectronics. Participants at a special half‐day session of the 1985 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, Calif., (entitled “Hydrologic Monitoring Writh Microelectronics”), discussed recent advances in microelectronic applications that promote more and better hydrologic data acquisition at lower costs.Of particular interest were reports on the development of new sensors and monitoring techniques. F. Milanovich (Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.) highlighted the session with a fascinating presentation on the use of fiber optics to sense several water quality factors for in situ measurement of groundwater. Some specific organic contaminants can be determined so the sensors lend themselves to monitoring groundwater pollution. S.E. Silliman (University of Arizona, Tucson) found that thermistor probes in a borehole could accurately detect where water was flowing through interconnected fractures from another borehole. This technique appears to have interesting potential particularly where dyes and chemical tracers need to be avoided.