Salinity and Temperature Water Quality Monitoring

Online Water Quality Data

  • NERRS Long-term water-quality data from estuaries around the country, on a website designed for classroom use: www.estuaries.noaa.gov
  • NERRS Long-term water-quality data from estuaries around the country, on a website designed for use by scientists: www.nerrsdata.org
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Lesson Plan: Storm in San Francisco Bay

This lesson plan from the Estuaries 101 Earth Science Module explores the San Francisco estuary and watershed using Google Earth (Part 1 and 2) and water-quality data collected before, during, and after a storm event (Part 3). Part 3 (the data exploration portion) can be used independently of the other parts and is a good introduction to data interpretation and/or student use of www.estuaries.noaa.gov graphing tool. Download the student and teacher guides to this Lesson Plan: http://estuaries.noaa.gov/Doc/PDF/ES3_EstWatershed.pdf

Additional Resources for Estuaries 101 Earth Science Activity 3: This ppt file  contains additional images and replacement graphs for use with this lesson. The resources are especially useful if the lesson is used as an introduction to the NERRS data graphing tool.

Instructions for using a refractometer to measure salinity.

Agenda from Estuary Ecology Day workshop about this topic.