Continuous Monitoring Buoy Network

Coastal water quality is being remotely measured across a network of sites around Northern Ireland. This is being done as a collaborative project between the NIEA, Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD), and the Foyle, Carlingford and Irish Lights Commission (The Loughs Agency).

Water quality is measured by instruments at a number of moored monitoring stations that transmit data via the mobile phone network back to a base station. The data is then made available almost immediately on the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute website's Coastal Monitoring pages.

Data provided by this project has many practical benefits including:

• Better quality information for better pollution control, water management and policy development
• High resolution data available for public and scientific scrutiny
• This monitoring partially fulfils the requirements for the OSPAR Convention and relevant European Commission directives.