Read about some of the Instrument System team's latest projects in state-of-the-art delivery of environmental information.
NIWA is assisting an international research team to carry out an intensive flood dynamics study on a four-kilometre reach of the Rees River, a large braided river that flows into Lake Wakatipu at Glenorchy. ‘Project Reesscan’ aims to enhance models of river-channel change and gravel transport during floods, enabling the consequences of these natural processes to be managed more effectively.
The NIWA Instrument Systems team is a specialised consulting group within NIWA, with a unique role of designing, installing, and maintaining environmental-monitoring systems. We provide a diverse technical capability that enables NIWA scientists, and external clients, to accurately monitor the environment and gather environmental data.
One of the Instrument Systems team’s more complex projects recently was to help create an experimental system which accurately acidifies and measures the pH of seawater in simulated Antarctic conditions. NIWA scientists can now research how ocean acidification is likely to affect Antarctic shellfish.
For over two decades NIWA has installed automatic monitoring systems in hostile environments, and probably none is more hostile than the Antarctic. In 2009 we were involved in a project with a difference - installing a climate station as part of a project to protect Scott's Hut, Cape Evans.
