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State employee receives national award for water resource protection
Story Date: 5/2/2012
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Source: PRESS RELEASE, 5/1/12
Jay Sauber, chief of the state Division of Water Quality’s Environmental Sciences Section, was today named the first recipient of the Barry Alan Long Award by the National Water Quality Monitoring Council.
The Barry Alan Long Award was established to honor an individual who has demonstrated exceptional perseverance, positive spirit and significant contributions to water resource protection. This is the first year the award has been presented. The council that presented the award provides a national forum for water quality monitoring, assessment and reporting.
“We at DWQ (the N.C. Division of Water Quality) are very pleased that Jay is getting this well-deserved recognition from the National Water Quality Monitoring Council,” said Chuck Wakild, the division’s director. “Jay’s work, both at the state and national levels, has contributed to a deeper understanding of how water bodies adapt to natural and human activities – important factors in determining productive management strategies.”
For more than 35 years, Sauber worked to develop and implement scientifically-based water quality assessment tools for use in managing water resources in North Carolina. He coordinated the state’s contribution to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Lakes Monitoring Initiative in the 1980s and continues to support that effort. He has also made important contributions to the development of lake monitoring and protection strategies in North Carolina.
Sauber acquired the funding necessary to design and put in place the state’s random Ambient Monitoring System, which for six years has helped capture, in a scientifically supported way, a clearer and more robust picture of the overall health of the state’s water resources.
Sauber has also been a key partner in the collaborative efforts between the state and the University of North Carolina for the Neuse River Estuary Modeling and Monitoring Project. The project provides space and time-sensitive monitoring and assessment of water quality conditions in the state’s largest estuary system. The result is a scientifically supported understanding of the nutrient dynamics and environmental conditions that can lead to fluctuations in dissolved oxygen levels, algal blooms, fish kills and other issues important to the public interest and the state’s management of this critical resource.
The Environmental Sciences Section that Sauber directs collects physical and chemical data from more than 300 sites each month through its ambient monitoring program. The section also collaborates with coalitions of National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit holders to conduct physical and chemical monitoring on a watershed scale. Today, seven coalitions monitor 250 sites that complement the state’s other monitoring programs and reduce costs for permittees.
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