Meet the Expert who is Assessing Water Quality

Meet the Expert – Amanjot Singh

CVC’s Amanjot Singh is a Senior Engineer of Water and Climate Change Science. His job is to analyze water quality data and create tools and models to help us understand potential threats to water quality.

What motivates you to do this work?

Water has always fascinated me – it supports all life on Earth. Water is used for drinking and for recreation, it provides habitats, like rivers and wetlands, for aquatic life, and it supports the agriculture that feeds us. Linking these pieces of the puzzle is what I like the most about my job. Our climate is changing and there is pressure from urbanization. I want to understand how these stressors might threaten access to clean and safe water resources for plants and animals in our watershed. My team and I are building state-of-the-art real-time monitoring network and modeling tools to further our understanding.

What is real-time monitoring?

Usually when we talk about water quality monitoring, we mean going into a river or lake, filling up a bottle with a water sample and sending it to a lab to be analyzed. We call this a grab sample. Real-time monitoring, however, allows us to collect measurements of key water quality parameters like temperature, dissolved oxygen and turbidity once every 15 minutes using sensors stationed throughout the Credit River Watershed. These sensors are connected through the cellular network and automatically upload data to our database so we can view them in “real-time” without ever leaving the office. This data is also available on our website.

Why is it important to monitor water quality in real-time?

Real-time data are measured continuously so they capture changes in key water quality indicator parameters that happen quickly. This is important when big storm events come through or if there is a spill. Monitoring such events is important for protecting drinking water sources. Without real-time data it would be very difficult to measure the water quality impacts of these events.

We use grab sampling to complement our real-time monitoring by analyzing parameters like nutrients and metals that cannot be measured with sensors. Together this gives us a more complete understanding of water quality conditions.

How does CVC use this data?

Real-time monitoring is helping us to develop a water quality model. This model will help us predict how water quality might be impacted by climate change and land-use change up to 50 years into the future.

The first step is to make sure that the model can accurately reflect today’s water quality conditions. We do this by comparing model results to our real-time water quality data to make sure they match up.

We will use the water quality model results to inform CVC’s Watershed Plan. The Watershed Plan is a tool that helps us understand the past and help us make better management decisions to build resiliency in our watershed. It identifies current and future water quality, health, and environmental problems and proposes solutions.

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