Development of innovative techniques for testing and mapping private well water quality

Abstract

This paper documents the development of portable kit for testing and mapping water quality in the field. Previously, thorough testing and reporting on well water quality required multiple steps, including costly and time-consuming lab work that often made such testing impractical. To address this problem, a water sampling kit was created that consists of a pocket PC, a GPS receiver and probes to test for pollutants. The kit automatically records the geographical coordinates at the water sampling site, as well as the data collected by the probes into one spreadsheet. The data is then linked to a GIS for display in a simple and usable manner. The efficiency of the kit gives it the potential to create a new standard for sampling water, particularly in the case of private wells, which are currently inadequately monitored due to scarce state resources. This paper describes the process of researching, designing, and testing the water sampling system.