CUAHSI-HMF Hands-on Workshop — Distributed Sensing: Taking it to the field

A Hands-on Workshop on Wireless Autonomously Powered Environmental Sensing will be held July 16-18 in Boulder Colorado. The workshop will immediately follow the CUAHSI Biennial Science Meeting. It will be a hands-on workshop exploring the current state of the art of distributed sensing for environmental observation. The workshop will include field installations, current practitioners, manufacturers, and scientists interested in including these methods in their research programs. The spaces in the workshop will be limited to 60 participants, with representation balanced between each of the categories.

Motivation and Modality

In hydrologic science, as well as environmental science generally, understanding is limited by the frequency and spatial distribution of co-located multi-parameter observations. For more than a decade wireless "mote" sensing platforms have been touted as a key technology to address this need, during which time cellular phones, and wireless internet services have been socially transformative. Remarkably, the availability of robust turn-key wireless environmental sensing systems has been limited, even in the context of significant investments from industry, the national science foundation, and university research teams. This workshop will provide a benchmark for the technology, including multiple installations of networks of sensing systems, syntheses of the state of the art in each of the critical technological components, and opportunity to take part in formal and casual conversation with practitioners and vendors. Participants will leave the event up-to-date with the state of the art in development and deployable systems.

The workshop will include extended lectures followed by plenary discussions of the following topics:

• Sensor selection: Long-wave, short-wave, snow depth, air temperature, RH, wind speed and direction, soil moisture, soil matric potential, precipitation, skin temperature, sound level, and imagery.
• Sensor calibration, operation, and maintenance
• Communication standards: all about 802.15.4 Zigbee, 802-11g, n, s etc.
• Network operation: single and multi-hop algorithms, on-the-fly reprogramming
• Data flow and management
• Web-servers of data
• Environmental Challenges: snow, rain, trees, buildings, vandalism, high wind, extreme temperature