Snow Water Equivalent Monitoring with Wireless Sensor Networks

Project Goals

Monitoring snow water equivalent (SWE)- that is, the amount of water in a snowpack- is essential for natural resource planning and control, avalanche prediction, and understanding environmental transformations such as global warming. However, technology for automated remote monitoring of SWE is relatively primitive, hard to deploy, expensive, and environmentally impactful. The goal of this project is to introduce significantly cheaper and easier deployed and maintained technologies for remote monitoring of SWE, based on wireless sensor networks and cutting-edge sensor technologies.

Informative Links

A white paper describes our project in more detail.
Here is a trip report from a scouting mission to Mt. Mansfield, Summer 2007, when we investigated potential sites for deploying prototypes of our system.
The SnowMan team developed a simple prototype SWE monitoring system for an undergraduate Senior project; their site contains lots of pictures and information.

Project Members

Our project is interdisciplinary and involves faculty and students from earch science, engineering, and computer science disciplines.

Faculty

Jeff Frolik, Assistant Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering
Christian Skalka, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Beverley Wemple, Associate Professor of Geography and Geology
Tom Neumann, Assistant Professor of Geology

PhD Students

Tiffany Larsen, Geography

BS Students

Matt Casari, Electrical Engineering
Chris Henwood, Electrical Engineering
Charley Robinson, Computer Science