Implementing a real-time water and weather quality monitoring system with applications in sustainability education

The implementation of a real-time water monitoring system developed to enhance water sustainability education is discussed. This system, called LabVIEW Enabled Watershed Assessment System (LEWAS), is a logical extension of prior data acquisition modules that have been successfully implemented using LabVIEW in the first freshman engineering course at Virginia Tech. The system will measure water quality and quantity data including flow rate, pH, dissolved Oxygen, conductivity and temperature - as indicators of stream health - for an oncampus impaired stream in real-time. In addition, weather parameters (temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity and precipitation) are measured at the site of the lab located on the stream. LEWAS is solar powered and uses the campus wireless network through a high-gain antenna to transmit data to remote clients in real-time. Remote users can change the sampling intervals and modify the LabVIEW programs that run on the system to analyze the data with proper access privileges. Pilot applications of LEWAS have been conducted in the freshman engineering course. Students have expressed positive attitudes towards the applicability and usefulness of LabVIEW in the context of environmental monitoring and the impact of real-time monitoring on increasing their environmental awareness. The authors plan to extend the use of this cost-effective yet highly accessible system to higher level civil and environmental engineering courses to provide an authentic context for problem solving involving environmental parameters of an impaired stream.