PANTHYR Instrument Installed In Chesapeake Bay To Monitor Water Quality, Validate Satellite Data

Abstract

Climbing 30-meter ladders and avoiding osprey nests might not sound like typical activities for scientists who usually work with equations and models—but it’s all in a day’s work for Kevin Turpie’s team, which includes an international group of scientists and engineers from UMBC, NASA, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) and the Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee (VLIZ), also known as the Flanders Marine Institute, also in Belgium. Over the last 15 months, they have collaborated with Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) staff, with the blessing of the U.S. Coast Guard, to install, monitor, and repair a new instrument on top of a Coast Guard navigation tower in Chesapeake Bay near Tolchester, Maryland.