Pollutant Source Tracking

The nature and extent of anthropogenic contamination from Navy vice industrial sources is often difficult to define or discern. Failure to distinguish between Navy releases, background conditions, and other non-Navy responsible parties can result in excessive or unnecessary remediation costs on the part of the Navy. A number of constituent-based methodologies are becoming available, such as chemical (molecular and isotopic), biochemical (molecular biology), and microbial "fingerprinting" techniques. This project focuses on these types of methodologies for organics, metals, and pathogen contaminants.

Capabilities:

• Rapid sediment characterization (RSC)
• Advanced chemical fingerprinting (ACF)
• Multi-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS)
• Bacteria source tracking (BST)
• Principal component analysis (PCA)
• Linear discriminate function analysis (LDFA)
• Artificial neural networks (ANN)
• Self-organizing map

Applications:

• Total maximum daily load (TMDL), compliance and cleanup programs

More information:

• Marine Environmental Survey Capability
• Bioassay Laboratory
• Chemistry Laboratory