System-wide Monitoring Program

The Impacts of Weather on Water Quality

As part of the System-wide Monitoring Program, each reserve has a weather station that collects data on temperature, wind speed and direction, relative humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR).

Weather conditions can have a strong influence on water quality. For example, rainfall influences salinity in estuaries and can increase runoff of sediment and organic material that in turn may influence other parameters such as dissolved oxygen, turbidity, pH and temperature.

The data collected by this monitoring program have shown that hurricanes can have a dramatic but short-term affect on water quality parameters like temperature and salinity.


Monitoring data for each reserve are available from the Centralized Data Management Office.

For more information, contact Whitley Saumweber.