Ocean Optics: Your Partner in Environmental Monitoring Solutions

Every day we witness changes occurring in the world around us. We see the construction of roads, homes, shops and factories to accommodate our growing population. This explosive expansion in people and infrastructure has a significant impact on the environment around us. Improving our ability to monitor the environment provides vast insight into the changes occurring and leads us to solutions that can abate negative effects before they fully materialise.

Governments today are keen on maintaining a healthy environment. Increased funding is available to help curb humanity’s effect on the environment along with new regulations and environmental standards focused on reducing air, water and soil pollution. Today’s environmental monitoring systems must be flexible enough to meet new, continually changing government standards. A one-size-fits-all approach will not ensure optimal performance in a rapidly changing regulatory environment.

System integrators are visionaries who excel at bringing hardware and software components together into a novel, innovative solution. In many cases, they partner with a variety of technology suppliers to provide a unified, seamless solution. In the case of environmental monitoring instrumentation, these partnerships are critical to expand expertise and technology to cover the broad range of samples and conditions faced with environmental monitoring.

Challenges of Environmental Monitoring

Air, water and soil samples are extremely complex requiring high sensitivity and advanced data processing for trace level detection. Imagine the challenge of detecting and quantifying trace contaminants in an exhaust stream with its harsh conditions and complicated mixture of particulates, water vapor and many other compounds. Additional challenges come with the need for remote monitoring stations requiring autonomous operation in harsh environments 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. The challenge increases even further when remote monitoring stations are in difficult to reach, isolated locations where servicing the instrument regularly is not an option. For these reasons, components and instrumentation must be reliable performing in a range of ambient conditions for long-term measurements spanning days, weeks or even months.

At Ocean Optics, partnering is what we do best. From the very beginning, we tackled a challenging real-world measurement that required us to think outside the box and develop a solution that changed the way optical sensing is done. Because of this work, we introduced the world’s first modular spectrometer designed to study ocean acidification via remote optical sensing of pH in the ocean. Since then the modular spectrometer has enabled remote sensing and environmental monitoring applications around the globe. We have decades of experience in the environmental community making us an ideal partner for the development of environmental monitoring solutions. With a wide range of product offerings covering the UV-Vis-NIR and MIR wavelength ranges and compact products for spectral imaging and multi-element detection, Ocean Optics is a trusted brand in the optical sensing world. Our product line provides an array of options that can be tailored to specific regulations and monitoring standards. Compact size, low power requirements, configurability and ease of integration make Ocean Optics modular components ideal for use in environmental monitoring applications. Read about a case study in our whitepaper, download for free here.