Environmental Studies with the Sensor Web: Principles and Practice

Abstract

In 1997, the Sensor Web was conceived at the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)to take advantage of the increasingly inexpensive, yet sophisticated, mass consumer-marketchips for the computer and telecommunication industries and use them to create platforms thatshare information among themselves and act in concert as a single instrument. This instrumentwould be embedded into an environment to monitor and even control it. The Sensor Web’spurpose is to extract knowledge from the data it collects and use this information to intelligentlyreact and adapt to its surroundings. It links a remote end-user's cognizance with the observedenvironment. Here, we examine not only current progress in the Sensor Web technology, butalso its recent application to problems in hydrology to illustrate the general concepts involved.

Keywords

• Sensor Web
• network
• wireless
• hydrology
• flood.