Here at the NERR, our SWMP (System-Wide Monitoring Program) team goes out every month to collect water samples and keep the instruments (sondes) that collect continuous water quality measurements going strong. The point of this blog is to bring you into our daily lives (or at least, monthly!), to let you know what we see and what we talk about when we’re out on the boat, cleaning off the mud and looking over the data!
So, here we go!
Look for our ‘SWaMP Talk’ post monthly, after we get out on the water and can report back!
January 14-15, 2025
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr. It was a cold two days on the water! We rugged up and got out there anyway! We needed to clean off the solar panels that power our stations, clean and download the data sondes, and collect our monthly water grabs for nutrients, suspended sediment and chlorophyll (plankton and algal pigments).
There were lots of pelicans, both brown and white, that were hunkered down in the marsh and perched on our sonde (SWMP) stations (hence, the need to clean the solar panels). Later in the week we had reports of dead and dying mullet around Bayou Cumbest boat launches after the cold snap that week, but when we were out earlier in the week (Tues and Wed), we didn’t see any ourselves**.
Speaking of fish, we often find little visitors that like to hang out in the guard that protects our sonde sensors – like this little combtooth blenny that we released back into the water.
We also saw lots of little waterfalls of freshwater coming off the marsh platform – and the water in Cumbest and Heron was pretty fresh (around 2 ppt, which is VERY fresh for our estuary) and very cold (10 ºC/50 ºF).
Looking at the data from the weather station (Centralized Data Management Office | Data Export System), there was a rain event of ~1.5 inches on January 10, which decreased the salinity in the upper bayous the next day and the low salinities continued during the next several low tide events (see graph of Bayou Cumbest from the CDMO website below).
The water levels were pretty low, which is usual for December and January. For those of you that also like to monitor our monitoring stations (CDMO RTA; click on GNDBCWQ (Bayou Cumbest), GNDBHWQ (Bayou Heron), GNDBLWQ (Bangs Lake)), you might see salinity drop to zero but that is not usually the case in the field. The probes responsible for taking the salinity measurements are simply just not in the water because the tide is so low.
That’s all for this month, but if you see us out on the water, give us a wave!
We’ll blog again next month with February updates!
** (update on 1/29/25) There was a large fish kill that occurred in the estuary this past week due to the freeze/snow event around January 21. We estimated around 19,000 dead fish, mostly mullet, in Bayou Cumbest alone!
