Marine Water Quality & Harmful Algal Bloom Monitoring

Harmful algal blooms have killed thousands of tonnes of fish in the Gulf, damaged coral reefs and forced desalination plants to shut down for months. Detecting them early, and acting before they reach seafood, swimmers or a seawater intake, is now part of everyday work for environmental laboratories, desalination operators, aquaculture farms and coastal authorities. This course teaches you to read marine water quality data, recognise when a bloom becomes harmful, design and run a monitoring programme, collect reliable samples, interpret laboratory results, and apply a tiered response plan for harvest closures, beach advisories, desalination intakes and fish farms. It is built on WHO guidance for recreational water, the Codex standard for live and raw bivalve molluscs, and real events, including the 2008–2009 Gulf bloom, the Saadiyat Beach closure and a shellfish harvest closure and reopening in Orkney, Scotland. Workplace scenarios at every step let you practise the decisions you will make on the job.

Coastal monitoring skills are needed in environmental laboratories, municipalities and environment agencies, desalination and power utilities, aquaculture and seafood businesses, and port and coastal HSE teams across the GCC. This course gives you the practical, evidence-based judgement those employers look for, and it connects naturally to the PCR & Molecular Diagnostics, ISO/IEC 17025 and HACCP SkillCerts.