Five hundred times a day, Washington state ferries depart from terminals in such places as Friday Harbor, Point Defiance, Mukilteo and Fauntleroy, crisscrossing Puget Sound and other inland waters for a combined 2,500 miles before being tied to the dock at day’s end.
The biggest vessels can carry 2,500 passengers and hundreds of vehicles. Now some scientists at the University of Washington hope they will start carrying monitoring equipment that would help track water conditions in the Sound and elsewhere.
The devices would be installed in the ferries’ intakes, which supply water to cool the ships’ engines. The monitors could provide nearly continual measurements of temperature, salinity, oxygen levels, turbidity, pH levels, nutrient levels, algal blooms and even pollution, and relay the data to shore-based computers.
The ferries “are an ideal platform,” Jan Newton, an oceanographer at the university’s Applied Physics Lab. “They go back and forth, repetitively, in all kinds of weather, all times of year, night and day.”
Newton likens it to “taking the pulse” of the Sound. “It’s very exciting,” she said.
Backers of the proposal have held preliminary talks with the state ferry officials, who are receptive to the idea. There would be no engineering problems in placing the equipment inside the ferries’ cooling water intakes and the existing wireless system on the vessels could transmit the data back to shore, said Steven Vandor, IT director for the state ferry system.
“It’s clearly doable,” Vandor said. Some of the ferries already carry weather stations onboard that transmit data to University of Washington scientists, he noted.
Oceanographic equipment was first placed on ferries crossing the Baltic Sea from Finland to Germany more than a decade ago. The ferries plying North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound were the first in the United States to carry the monitors. In addition to Puget Sound, there are proposals to equip ferries in San Francisco Bay, Nantucket Sound, Delaware Bay and Long Island Sound.
The Puget Sound proposal comes amid mounting concern about the health of the state’s inland waters and as the governor, the state Legislature and the federal government launch a major cleanup effort.
Establishing a monitoring system to sample water conditions has to be an integral part of such a program, and the ferries offer an ideal vehicle to collect information, Newton said. Currently, Newton said, much of the data on the Sound comes from samples taken by scientists flying around in a float plane once a month and landing at various locations to take measurements.
The ferries and a system of two dozen or so buoys could vastly improve on what is known, providing the data in real time, she said.
“People are running sophisticated computer models involving the Sound and they can use more data,” she said.
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