FTS

FTS was founded in 1980 to address the demanding weather information requirements of the world’s premier forest fire management agencies. The fire community’s strong requirements for rock-solid dependability and fast, trouble-free operation shaped FTS’s early product development efforts and helped create a corporate culture dedicated to meeting the practical needs of its customers.

Today, our equipment and software are measuring, recording, and analyzing changes in watersheds, national forests, nationwide weather system networks, supply streams for drinking water reservoirs, the waters of fish and wildlife refuges and many other environments. Our monitoring stations reflect three decades of technological advancement focused on our goal of designing and manufacturing the world’s most reliable, simplest to use, and simplest to maintain systems.

Our headquarters, research and design lab, and factory are located in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with a branch office in Blaine, Washington. From here, we supply equipment around the world, including North America, South America, Asia, and Europe. Comprehensive in-the-field service and installation contracts are available throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

FTS automated environmental monitoring stations and FTS communications technology continue to advance the standard for remote site monitoring systems, from single sites to nationwide networks. FTS equipment and software forms the backbone of some of the world’s most sophisticated and demanding water and weather monitoring networks: nationwide networks of GOES weather stations; large regional systems of over 200 radio modem stations; and state, provincial, and municipal networks using combinations of cellular, telephone, satellite, and radio modem communications.

FTS stations have proven themselves under the most demanding conditions, from the most remote northern regions of Canada to the sun beaten, wind-blown salt and sand of the Mexican coast. Our customers include over 50 government agencies in the United States, Canada, and Mexico: customers who demand the highest levels of reliability, accuracy, and operational effectiveness.

Today we are hard at work making constant improvements in our existing products and creating new tools and systems for the world’s meteorological and hydrological monitoring communities.

Turbidity is the cloudiness or murkiness of water caused by suspended organic or inorganic materials. Turbidity in natural waters is recognized as an important indicator of its environmental health.

• Turbidity can be a good indication of impairments such as nutrients and e-coli, and is an excellent surrogate for suspended sediment concentration.
• Fish habitat is impacted by turbidity. Suspended particles absorb sunlight, raising the temperature of water which causes oxygen concentration to fall. Poor visibility also impedes feeding.
• Monitoring turbidity in a watershed permits preemptive response to water quality events which could otherwise put the public health in jeopardy. FTS' StreamWatch systems can be configured with flexible early warning detection capabilities to fire alarms via email or SMS messaging upon one or more conditions being met.
• Enables regulatory and compliance monitoring of NTU thresholds, TMDLs and BMPs.
• Permits monitoring impacts of land development and resource extraction, including adherence to the EPA’s new standards controlling the discharge of pollutants from construction sites. FTS' portable QD ('Quick Deploy') systems provide an ideal solution for temporary turbidity monitoring needs.
• Provides easy detection of contaminants due to stormwater runoff.
• Turbidity is very useful for triggering strategic, event-based automated sampling. Unlike stage or other measurements, an increase in turbidity is definitely indicative of an issue that should be sampled. Our SedEvent system is designed around this concept of turbidity threshold sampling.
• Continuous monitoring of turbidity captures far more temporal data to provide a far better characterization of turbidity changes over time than manual grab sampling.

FTS systems are used by government agencies and private corporations for various water quantity and water quality applications. Regardless of the application, the fully integrated design of our systems provides a simple, turn-key solution for those who appreciate the chance to focus on their field work rather than troubleshoot and configure electronics. Components used in our systems excel in reducing maintenance requirements, so no matter how complex the system needed for your application, it saves money over time, resulting in a low total cost of ownership

Turbidity Monitoring 

The DTS-12 turbidity sensor is the World's Best Instream Turbidity Sensor™, and powers our StreamWatch systems for continuous instream turbidity monitoring. Turbidity in natural waters is recognized as an important indicator of its environmental health, and because it's a good surrogate for suspended sediment, monitoring turbidity has always been a 'holy grail' for hydrologists, but because of earlier technology 'turbidity' has traditionally been a 'bad word'. The DTS-12 is the first sensor to make turbidity monitoring practical, and no longer difficult, inaccurate, expensive, labor-intensive. 

Hydromet

FTS Hydromet stations leverage our expertise in water quality and water quantity monitoring and our 30 years experience designing rugged and reliable weather stations. We have designed hundreds of turnkey hydromet stations, and if accurate data is critical to you, we can design and build one for you.

Stream Gauging

The flexibility, ruggedness and simplicity of the AxiomTM H2 datalogger make it ideally suited to stream gauging stations, which we have installed in some of the most challenging streams and rivers in North America

Watershed Monitoring

Reliability and accuracy are critical in multi-parameter hydrologic monitoring. For remote or community watersheds, small or large networks, FTS can reduce maintenance costs and provide higher quality data to allow a more accurate analysis of water quality. Dependable early warning detection also increases public safety.

FTS is the world leader in environmental monitoring solutions for fire weather. FTS stations are in use by every one of the top 50 government forest management agencies in every corner of the United States and Canada. No one else dedicates as much of its research and development efforts to the needs of fire weather professionals. FTSportable and fixed-site weather stations set the standard for reliability and simplicity of operation, maintenance, and installation.

FTS supplies the equipment for the single largest fire weather network in the world.

As a manufacturer, we design and engineer the leading datalogger that is approved and fully supported by theNIFC Remote Sensing Fire Weather Support Unit (RSFWSU). Our G5 GOES transmitter is recognized as the most reliable GOES technology available, and is licensed for use by other environmental monitoring equipment manufacturers.

• In the US, fire weather stations are known as RAWS (Remote Automated Weather Stations).
• Data from RAWS stations is used to calculate the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) fire danger indices, used by fire managers throughout the US.
• The FTS RAWS station is used in all 50 states and is fully supported by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) depot in Boise, ID.
• NIFC publishes stringent RAWS standards, and fully endorses the FTS RAWS station.
• FTS gear is optimized with built-in features to support NFDRS maintenance standards.