Drowning in Data – a smart, serviceable, scalable catchment solution for Section 82 Monitoring from Xylem: POSTER
Chapman, J., Hanson, D., Lang, P. and Clarke, R., Xylem Water Solutions UK Ltd, UK
(free)
Part 5, Section 82 of The Environment Act 2021 states all English water companies are required to continuously monitor water quality upstream and downstream from all non-exempt sewage storm overflows and sewage treatment works, which discharge into a watercourse.
This will create the world’s most extensive catchment-wide river water quality monitoring program, generating a vast number of datasets, which we will need to review, learn, understand, and turn into information for action to start improving our river health.
With potentially thousands of monitoring stations active in the field, it would take an army of people to daily view and interpret the data for every site. The Environment Agency’s current practice is to manually review datasets, which is a very timely exercise even by very experienced water quality professionals.
Artificial Intelligence through cloud-based telemetry platforms such as HydroSphere can process thousands of data points against norms to provide simple map visualisation with alarms. Intelligent, conditional-based smart alarms and colour visualisation can be used to see if sensors are within their expected water quality values, and to quickly highlight the areas for attention. This allows users to be more time efficient with their monitoring programme, maximising the value from their data and take urgent action when needed.
