Extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts and torrential rains, affect the water quality in lakes, rivers and coastal areas.
Extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts and torrential rains, affect the water quality in lakes, rivers and coastal areas. This creates significant challenges for ecosystems and water supplies, because pesticides that are bound in soil masses can quickly leach into water sources. Now researchers want to monitor this in a new way.
“Today’s monitoring systems aren’t equipped to detect rapid variations. This leaves critical gaps in environmental protection and public health preparedness. The goal of the project, called STARDUST, is to develop an optical sensor system that can detect multiple pesticides in real time in both surface water and groundwater,” says Elizaveta Vereshchagina, a senior research scientist in SINTEF’s Department of Smart Sensors and Microtechnology, Norway.
The technology will provide insight into how extreme weather affects the occurrence of pesticides in water. It is being developed with interdisciplinary collaborators from Norway, Romania, Poland, Ireland and Denmark.
Read more at: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Karolina Barbara Milenko-Kuszewska, a project manager and research scientist at SINTEF, examines the optical sensor that will measure water quality. (Photo Credit: Werner Juvik)
