Neuse Estuary Monitoring and Research Program

The NCSU Center for Applied Aquatic Ecology has developed an automated water quality monitoring system that can take profiles of conditions throughout the entire water column. The rights to this patent pending technology have been licensed to a major water quality technology corporation through the NCSU Office of Technology Transfer. The CAAE Profiler is an automated system built around a computer driven winch and water quality probe. It is expandable to include various biological and chemical probes, meteorological sensors, and different forms of real-time communication equipment, such as satellite, radio, and cellular modems.

Data are retrieved via cellular telemetry to a base computer, which can process the data, visualize it into graphical displays, post it to the web, and alert project managers when parameters are out of acceptable ranges. Meteorological and hydrological data are posted in real-time to the web for public use.

Originally designed and developed for use in the Neuse Estuary Monitoring and Research Program, the NCSU-CAAE profiler system has also been used in the following research programs:

City of Raleigh (initially NC Department of Health and Human Services) at Falls Lake Reservoir
City of High Point at City Lake Park and Oak Hollow Reservoir
National Science Foundation at Duck Pier
Clean Water Management Trust Fund at Wake Forest
Cape Carteret Community College at Bogue Sound
United States Army Center for Environmental Health Research at Pelican Point
South Carolina Algal Ecology Lab at Kiawah Island, SC