Custom instrumentation for hydrology and water monitoring

The detailed monitoring of any water body, both superficial water and groundwater, obviously requires dedicated field automated instrumentations. Moreover, the number of monitoring devices is often crucial for a good characterization of the observed water system. Often commercial devices require significant investments of money, which rapidly grow with the number of acquired parameters and device functionalities (such as solar recharger, GSM connectivity, etc). This limits the number of devices that can be used in such monitoring studies. Additionally, commercial options usually lack modularity, which may be necessary for adapting to different environments and monitoring objectives. Open-source electronics platforms offer both low-cost components and modularity of the devices. Particularly, the Arduino platform, an open-source and low-cost prototyping platform allows for building and developing versatile and effective water monitoring loggers. Moreover, due to its long presence on the market, the Arduino platform has a consistent community of users both from the hobbyist and the scientific world which represents a wide source of information and inspiration. In the present work, a few basic information about the microcontrollers and the Arduino board will be presented. Then we’ll report an example of an Arduino Nano board-based datalogger for monitoring water temperature and water level, with a particular focus on the hardware part of the logger and different sensor options.