FORT EDWARD – Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries Thursday announced it has deployed its first of many real-time monitoring stations to watch the northern reaches of the Hudson River.

The monitoring station, launched in cooperation with General Electric, will provide minute-to-minute data regarding the physical, chemical and biological conditions of the Hudson and St. Lawrence rivers, said Institute Director John Cronin.

“We are going to compare the information that we are going to collect with the information General Electric is collecting and try and correlate the materials suspended in the river with the PCB concentrations that General Electric is monitoring,” he said. “In the end, this could be an early warning system about PCBs flowing down the river. It can give us a much better picture of how the Upper Hudson operates.”

The monitor is deployed just north of the Thompson Island Dam in the vicinity of the first phase of the Upper Hudson River dredging project performed by GE last year.