Hatfield's Coastal Monitoring Station is a state-of-the-art “mini mooring” one meter (three feet) above the Yaquina estuary floor. Climate-grade oceanographic instruments measure water quality parameters and transmit the results in real-time: salinity, temperature, depth (tide), pH, dissolved oxygen, nitrate, phytoplankton fluorescence, turbidity and scattering. The tidal range is 3.7 meters (12 feet) at this location. This data is backed up on servers at the Oregon Data Center in Salem so that it will remain open access to the public.
Live data for the instruments below is housed on the CORIOLIX website, a real-time data access and visualization project through Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. This information is available for free to the public.
YSI EXO Sonde
This instrument is the workhorse of estuary monitoring stations worldwide.
It has different probes measuring salinity, temperature, depth (tide), pH, dissolved oxygen, phytoplankton fluorescence, and turbidity.
Sea-Bird ECO Triplet
As its name suggests, the Triplet measures three parameters: phytoplankton fluorescence at 695 nanometers (nm), fluorescent dissolved organic matter at 460 nm, and scattering at 700 nm.
Sea-Bird SUNA
Did you know that dissolved nitrate in seawater absorbs ultra-violet light?
The SUNA is a UV spectrophotometer that calculates nitrate concentrations in the water from UV absorption.