Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2011MA287B

Monitoring and Understanding Water Quality at Three Potential Charles River Swimming Sites

Institute: Massachuseits
Year Established: 2011 Start Date: 2011-03-01 End Date: 2012-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $5,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $12,775

Principal Investigators: Ferdi Hellweger

Abstract: This project focuses on monitoring and understanding water quality at three potential Charles River swimming sites. The project builds on our high resolution (daily and hourly) monitoring at five sites conducted during Summer 2010, which provided some insights into the water quality at the sites, but also identified additional research needs. Specifically, there is a need to characterize the water quality over a wider range of precipitation events, to relate our high-resolution data to those of other long-term monitoring efforts (e.g. Charles River Watershed Association), and to analyze dam operation and/or wind factors. We will perform daily sampling of E. coli, turbidity and temperature at three potential swimming locations from June 1 through August 15. In addition, we will deploy two ISCO autosamplers Mo-Fr from July 1 through July 31 for hourly E. coli analysis. The 2010 and 2011 data will be analyzed for relation to long-term monitoring data collected by CRWA and MWRA, and considering dam operation and wind variables.