|
The Environmental Protection Agency by virtue of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendment of 1972 and the Clean Air Act of 1970 is mandated to: restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Nation's waters; and reduce air pollution to levels considered safe for man and the environment. Environmental monitoring is of paramount importance and absolutely necessary to achieve the above objectives. Because of the various types and extent of the monitoring required the task is formidable and challenging, requiring innovative techniques and instrumentation. The extent to which monitoring is required includes the entire country in the three media-air, water and land. The magni-tude of the problem is realized considering that: (1) over 32,000 major air pollution point sources must be brought into compliance with final emission limitations as prescribed in approved State implementation plans, (2) regulation of 40,000 industrial water users and 13,000 municipal sewage treatment plants is necessary to control pollutant discharge into the Nation's waterways and (3) the Agency has a mandate to monitor land quality and assess the use of land as they impact air and water pollution. Due to the above requirements for monitoring, the Agency has a continuing monitoring methods development program. The program supports the development of new techniques for monitoring the environment. The necessity to develop new techniques is predicated upon the Agency's mandate to monitor large geographical areas in air, water and land. One class of monitoring which holds great promise for cost effectively meeting this challenge is remote monitoring. The term remote moniterin9 is defined as sensing qualitatively and/or quantitatively a specific chemical, biological and/or physical parameter of the environment where the monitoring instrument and the parameter under investigation are separated by some distance. This paper presents an overview of remote monitoring instrumentation, and includes a discussion of the role remote monitoring may play in the Agency's overall monitoring program.
|
