The National Science Foundation's Biological Field Stations and Marine Laboratories (FSML) has awarded a grant to the Romberg Tiburon Center (RTC), the marine science laboratory and teaching facility of San Francisco State University. This grant will fund the purchase of a long-term environmental monitoring system that will be located on the north shore of San Francisco Bay at the RTC. Because of the dynamics of marine physics, chemistry, and biology in the region, the San Francisco Bay estuary is a site of constantly changing conditions of weather, salinity, temperature, clarity, current direction, solar irradiance and phytoplankton (microscopic algae) concentrations. Marine scientists need a long-term record of these conditions to place project-specific observations into the context of changes in Bay conditions over various temporal scales. Furthermore, anticipated long-term changes in climate can only be assessed via a record of conditions in the Bay.
Funds from the grant will be used to establish a weather station that will record temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, rainfall and solar irradiance. In addition, sensors will be placed at a series of seawater depths off the RTC pier to record water quality conditions. All data will be collected continuously, saved on a workstation computer at the RTC, and graphed to show minute by minute trends.
The information will be available to scientists from other laboratories both on the Bay and at nearby marine laboratories outside the Bay. There are many immediate applications for the information collected by this system. For example, the data will help a scientist working on a research ship to understand how his or her observations fit into trends in the biology and physics of the estuary. Long term changes in warming or in salinity of the Bay water can be documented. A Data Center will be constructed at a site at the RTC that is easily accessible to the public. SFSU will also make the data available to the public via a website. The University anticipates that students will find the information to be an excellent learning tool in which they can study the interplay among the tides, seasons, weather and the biology of bay waters.
