The state’s picking up $10 million of the $15 million tab to build a Hudson River research facility on the Troy riverfront, near Albany.

The Upper Hudson Research Center of the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries is expected to open in late 2010 and is where scientists and staff will work on an underwater network of sensors that will monitor the river 24/7. The institute and IBM announced the effort to build the network last summer. You can read that story after the break.

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Section: NEWS
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Source: STAFF
Edition: GWPR
Publication: The Journal News
Computer network would monitor Hudson 24/7

The American Indians along its banks referred to it as “the river that flows both ways” – a nod to its tides and currents. Thanks to a computerized monitoring and forecasting system unveiled yesterday, the Hudson River years from now may take on a new moniker: the river with no secrets.

“I think part of our mission here is to unlock as many river secrets as we can. I think one of the secrets of the river is how it changes on a day-to-day basis,” said John Cronin, a Cold Spring resident and the executive director of the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries.

The Dutchess County institute and the Armonk-based IBM Corp. announced a partnership yesterday to build and implement a river’s-length network of sensors to understand that change. The network would be the first of its kind on a major U.S. river, a waterway replete with history from the country’s birth to the spawning of the environmental advocacy movement.

From the river’s start at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks to its end in New York Harbor, the system will take the pulse of the Hudson – actually its temperature, its salinity, the amount of sediment it’s carrying, what fish are in it and a host of other vital signs. The sensors, along with robotics and a computer system, will scrutinize the river’s 315 miles 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The River and Estuary Observatory Network will affect the entire region, given the river’s role as a highway for cargo, a player in electricity generation, a venue for recreation and a supplier of drinking water.

IBM sees the river and its network as a proving ground for a technology with worldwide applications, one that could avert environmental disasters by warning downstream populations of coming contamination. But for advocates and researchers, it’s a chance to switch from the current method of discretely sampling the river to a giant, continuous grab of data. The network will allow scientists to better understand the river in real time, to acquire an understanding of its flux.

“We can’t take a snapshot. We have to look at it as a movie,” said Robin Bell, a senior scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Rockland County. “We’d like to predict what happens in real river time.”

The observatory is a partner in the network, which will involve hundreds, even thousands, of sensors. Neither a price tag nor a date when the system will be up and running has been determined yet.

The undertaking is similar to systems deployed in the world’s oceans that gather observations used to analyze various atmospheric and oceanic phenomena, such as El Nino. The mountain-to-the-sea network, however, will simultaneously gather, sort and analyze data from different points and in different forms as it happens, said Harry Kolar, global alliance executive for IBM. Traditional computer systems work with known or stored data.

Cronin said the network would allow environmental impacts to be predicted like weather forecasts. Decisions now about the movement of aquatic life or the flow of pollutants in the river are based on general observations, he said.

“We know there’s a blue crab population in Haverstraw Bay because fishermen tell us that. We don’t know if the blue crabs are wandering in the vicinity of the Indian Point (nuclear power plants) cooling intakes,” he said. “We don’t know if they’re wandering in the vicinity of sewage treatment plant outfalls.”

Indian Point, like other power plants along the Hudson, uses river water in its cooling system. Fish can get caught in the intakes and killed. The plant later discharges warm water into the Hudson that can harm many species. The monitoring system could be used to alert plant managers to the presence of large, nearby schools of fish or other river denizens.

Cronin said the network was the next, logical step in the Hudson’s evolution. In 2000, then-Gov. George Pataki called for the institute’s creation, envisioning a river version of the world-famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.

“The river has been saved,” Cronin said. “Like any patient that’s been saved, it needs rehabilitation, it needs to be built back up. It needs to be protected from any relapses.”

Reach Michael Risinit at mrisinit@lohud.com or 845-228-2274.more->