This article provides a simplified means of converting the conductivity of surface seawater (not fresh or brackish water) to salinity for general monitoring purposes. The current standards, PSS-78 and Thermodynamic Equation of Seawater – 2010 (TEOS-10), are available online, but use complicated equations and programs such as MATLAB that are not accessible to everyone.
Conductivity to salinity calculators based on PSS-78 are available online, but very few of them have batch processing capabilities and none can be used when monitoring conductivity in real-time with instruments that require linear scaling(e.g. The HOBO RX3000 with a 4-20 mA sensor). Here, we lay out our logic and method of creating a linear equation that allows temperature-compensated conductivity sensors to estimate salinity of surface seawater (practical salinity values of 22-42 at 0-200 m depth and 5-35°C) within 5% of the true value. The equation is provided below and the rest of the article explains how it was derived and why there are limitations to its use.
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