Case Study: Automated Data Acquisition System

Client: San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Location: Highland, CA Contact for information management projects: Gayle Thompson

Project Background & Challenges

During the last decade, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians has developed springs that supply its drinking water business. The spring resource is threatened by groundwater drainage from a major underground tunnel that is under construction along the northern reservation boundary. This tunnel will convey municipal water supplies. Aspect Consulting is helping the Tribe manage this spring and monitor the potential impacts of tunnel construction on its groundwater resources. This work has required extensive monitoring of pressure and flow data at 17 groundwater and surface water stations.

Solution

Aspect instrumented 16 horizontal and vertical wells, two springs, and an instream weir with high-resolution transducers. After recognizing the cost-effectiveness of real-time monitoring, we designed and installed an automated data-acquisition system (DAS) that records data daily. We also instrumented two stations in a remote canyon with dataloggers that we download manually.

The DAS sends data to Aspect’s office via phone-line telemetry and populates a custom Access database with over 5 million records. Supplemental data from the remote sites is added manually. Before the results are dynamically linked to presentation software, data is validated and used to make various calculations.