Fresh-salt water mixing region detection with low-cost pressure sensors

Inflow of fresh water from river to sea creates mixing of water layers with different salinity and often temperature, that plays a big role in sediment trapping. Localization of such mixing regions is necessary both for practical purposes (e.g., timely cleaning of shipways) and research (e.g. studying the anthropogenic impact). Analytical modelling of turbulence is challenging, and direct search for these regions is complicated by frequent changes (season, tides, precipitation, water release by hydropower dams). In this paper, we propose a novel and accurate method for finding mixing regions using low-cost and low energy budget pressure sensors. Being computationally efficient, the proposed method is suitable both for offline data processing and for real-time adaptive sampling.