Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2012

Water Quality Research Suffers

said. He knew he could create an unparalleled
data set of water samples, one the state could use
to determine how well it was managing the
sound’s water quality.

Paerl and his colleague Joe Ramus at Duke
wrote a white paper for the N.C. Sea Grant pro-
gram in 1997, but no one paid much attention to
it until hurricanes Dennis, Floyd and Irene swept
through North Carolina waters in 1999. “We all
woke up to satellite images of the flooding down
east and a muddy Pamlico Sound on the front
page of The News & Observer,” Paerl said. “Then
people started calling me.”
In the aid package after Floyd, the N.C. Gen-
eral Assembly included funds for Paerl’s project,
which he called FerryMon — short for Ferry
Monitoring System. From early 2000 through
June 2011, three ferries that carried passengers
across the Pamlico Sound also carried water sam-
pling instruments below deck. Paerl provided
public access to all his findings and helped the state
manage the water quality of this large system.

Over the past decade, FerryMon has become
the model for monitoring systems across the

nation, including on the Delaware Bay, Long
Island Sound, Puget Sound and Nantucket Sound.

When Ernesto pounded the Neuse Estuary, Paerl showed how fragile the ecosystem was and how rapidly it could change due to nutrient overloading. Fish and other sea life are sensitive creatures. A little too much nitrogen — no matter where it comes from — can stimulate algae to bloom and cause major damage.

But in June 2011, the General Assembly did not include FerryMon in the state budget. So Paerl can’t pay graduate students and technicians to replace sensors or calibrate the instruments. There’s no money to pay technicians to analyze the samples or manage the mountains of data the ferries collect.

“The timing couldn’t have been worse,” he said. A day after Hurricane Irene hit, the ferries were on the water as usual, and though FerryMon’s instruments were still on board, Paerl could collect only a few samples from one ferry that crossed the Neuse Estuary, thanks to a small National Science Foundation grant. The data have proved inconclusive. The state has lost its best method for measuring the health of an ecosystem that’s home to the largest fish nursery on the Eastern Seaboard.

According to a state mandate, there can be no more than 40 micrograms of chlorophyll A per liter of water in estuaries. The FerryMon data set was the best way to determine whether that criterion was being met.

“We have very little idea what Hurricane
Irene did to the Pamlico Sound last summer,”
Paerl said. “And that’s really a shame because if
you want to look at water quality trends you need
a continuous set of data over the course of years.”
Paerl hopes to regain funding. At 64, he’s now
part of the old guard at UNC’s Institute of
Marine Sciences, though he’s lost little passion.
He’d rather be on the water, but he spends a fair
amount of time trying to get FerryMon back on
line for 2012.

“You should know I’m a pit bull when it
comes to this stuff.”

— Mark Derewicz
Endeavors, UNC’s
research magazine,
now is online only.
Along with this feature
are these current
highlights from
endeavors.unc.edu.

Carol Cheatham studies the impact of nutrients babies get in the womb: endeavors.unc.edu/ cheatham.

Social scientist Neal
Caren is keeping tabs
on Facebook and the
Occupy movement:
endeavors.unc.edu/
occupy.

To study pain sensitivity, researchers have to recruit volunteers and inflict pain upon them: endeavors.unc.edu/jaw.

Paerl, a Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Marine Sciences, was honored with the Odum Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation in August 2011.