News Archive

New publication by Philipp Stadler

Philipp Stadler got his publication 'Real-time monitoring of beta-d-glucuronidase activity in sediment laden streams: A comparison of prototypes' recently published.

In his work he compares four automatic prototypes for the detection of enzymatic activity in the HOAL stream, which is used as a rapid surrogate for the culture-based microbiological pollution monitoring of water resources.

Installation of sediment sampler

Today Ottavia Zoboli (Alumni of the DK programme on water resource systems) and Helene Trautvetter (Institute for Water Quality, Resources and Waste Management, TU Wien) installed a sediment sampler in the HOAL catchment. Within a project from the TU Wien and the Umweltbundesamt of Austria, a monitoring of priority substances in surface waters takes place with several of these installations.
The HOAL will be one of these representative catchments.

Heavy rain fall event

As predicted last weekend heavy rain fall occured in eastern Austria. Also the HOAL was affected by high precipitation rates.

In 30 hours around 60mm of rainfall occured and this led to a discharge rise at the catchment outlet from 1,5 l/s to over 40,0 l/s. Compared to the mean rates (820mm/year mean annual precipitation; 4,0 l/s mean annual runoff) this was a middle high event which we were happy to catch with our sensors and installations. Several water samples were taken automatically and are currently under analysis for chemical and physical parameters in the laboratory.

Deep electromagnetic induction (EMI) measurements at the HOAL

In the last days Rasmi and Xiaofei were operating electromagnetic induction (EMI) measurements at the HOAL with support of Geophysics students from TU Wien.

Two devices with a shallow and a deep range of the signal have been used. There were several profiles on the different managed crop fields in the HOAL measured and georeferenced. The goal is to further characterize the soil's spatial heterogenities in the electrical conductivity down to around 7m depth by using this contact-less probes.

New soil moisture sensors for Sentinel calibration

For the ongoing ESA Sentinel-1A satellite calibration in the HOAL new soil moisture sensors were installed additionally between the existing soil net by Mariette Vreugdenhil. A network of in total 20 additional sensors will help evaluating the signals of Sentinel-1A.

A goal of the satellite observations is also to determine vegetation characterisitica, therefore Mariette is also going to do a regular sampling of the vegetation for detecting reference water content amounts. In addition she is measuring the development of the crops in the HOAL fields, where currently rapeseed is in its full bloom.