Salinity and turbidity are two important seawater properties for the physical oceanography. The study of physical oceanography requires a compact high-resolution in-situ salino-turbidi-meter to measure these two parameters in different ocean zones. Refractometry has been proved to be an effective method to measure seawater salinity from light beam deviation. Previous studies have shown that the transmission and scattering of light in a turbid medium impact the light beam deviation measurements,

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... which makes the combination of salinity and turbidity measurement with the same sample mandatory. In this paper, we analyze the requirements and challenges of refracto-turbidi-meter design from their measurement principles and correlations. According to these requirements, we propose a miniature refracto-nephelo-turbidi-meter with a CCD, which has a salinity measurement resolution of 2mg.kg -1 and a turbidity measurement resolution of 1% of the measurement range. Based on this refracto-nephelo-turbidi-meter, different embodiments are discussed to meet the different requirements for different ocean zones.