NitrateComp

NitrateComp: In-situ inter-comparison of nitrate sensors

User group PI: Eric Achterberg, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany

Hosting infrastructure: NIVA Research Station, Norway

Main Objectives

Nitrate is a key macronutrient in the marine environment. The availability of nitrate promotes growth, metabolism and biological production of photoautotrophic organisms. Physical and biological processes contribute to temporal and spatial variations in nitrate concentrations.

Coastal waters and shelf seas such as the North Sea represent a highly dynamic environment with strong nitrate variations associated with natural processes and also anthropogenic disturbances. Continuous monitoring of the variations of nitrate concentrations in such highly dynamic environments will provide the data needed to assess biological impacts and to establish potential remediation actions.

The main objective of the proposed project is to deploy and validate the current procedures for the determination of nitrate concentrations using in-situ autonomous marine sensors. T

The contributions of the proposed work to the main JERICO-NEXT project are:

  1. provide a large number of marine nitrate concentration measurements which will help to unravel the complex interconnections between the physical, biogeochemical and biological processes of a productive and highly dynamic coastal environment.
  2. Review and evaluate the performance of a commercial (TriOS OPUS) and a newly developed Lab-on-Chip (LOC) nitrate sensor with the aim of implementing analytical procedures and data processing.
  3. Provide crucial information for the compilation of simple and practical operational procedures for nutrient sensing to be employed as routine operations by research institutes, laboratories, regulatory organisations and companies.

Report:

NitrateComp Final Report (577.2 KiB)

 

Data:

JERICO LOC Processed-data (66.5 KiB)

 

JERICO OPUS Processed-data1 (166.4 KiB)

 

JERICO OPUS Processed-data2 (695.4 KiB)