For my students - another piece on landslides!
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Oct. 24, 2013 — Using technology
found in cell phones, inexpensive sensors being tested at Monte Sano State Park
might one day soon save lives by giving advance warning of deadly landslides in
at-risk areas around the world.
The wireless test sensors are installed around an active landslide zone
in the park. A team from the Atmospheric Science Department at The University
of Alabama in Huntsville is studying the sensors to see whether they can
provide useful information about soil stability and the likelihood of an
impending landslide.
Recent research estimated that more than 4,500 people are killed and
thousands of others are injured in landslides around the world every year.
What makes UAH's low cost sensors unique is, first, that they are low
cost. In addition to weather instruments, they also use off-the-shelf
technology that was developed for other uses, such as motion detectors that
also are used in cell phones (for game controllers or to tell the phone how it
is oriented) and in robotics. The sensor that tells when the soil is so
saturated by rain that it might become unstable was developed for irrigation
systems, to tell when a field has received enough water.
The bigger savings, however, are in the cell phone technology itself.
Previous sensor packages that provided real-time environmental data generally
required either a hard wire connection or expensive uplink hardware. Research
instruments that weren't connected by wire had to be routinely serviced, both
to collect the data and to change batteries.
The UAH sensors connect to the Internet using inexpensive cell phone
connections, so scientists at the university can monitor their instruments
without needing to either run wires into remote areas or have someone visit the
sensor boxes on a regular basis.
Eric Anderson, a research associate in UAH's Earth System Science
Center, learned about the wireless sensors -- which were conceived developed by
a University Space Research Association (USRA) scientist in Huntsville's National
Space Science and Technology Center -- while he was a research scientist in
Panama.
During the three years he was there, Anderson saw the destruction caused
by landslides throughout Central America.
"It is a problem almost every year in areas with steep slopes and
heavy rainfall," he said. "El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and
throughout the region, in many places it is a disaster waiting to happen. The
soil types found in that region also are more prone to landslides, especially
the volcanic and clay soils.
"Unfortunately, the volcanic soils also are some of the richer
soils, better for farming, so landslide-prone areas with volcanic soils tend to
be more densely populated."
After enrolling in the Earth system science program at UAH, Anderson
also went to work with NASA, giving him access to Karthik Srinivasan, the USRA
scientist who invented developed the wireless sensors for NASA's SERVIR
program. The sensors were created as a low-cost tool for calibrating an
airborne instrument that measures soil moisture. Because they were
self-contained, those first sensors could be moved from spot to spot as needed
to gather data on the ground at the same time the airborne instrument was
overhead.
After seeing the sensors in action, Anderson recognized the potential
value something similar might have in studying and monitoring landslides. He
took his idea to Dr. Udaysankar Nair, an associate professor of atmospheric
science.
"That's one of the things that makes this project so unique, is
that it was initiated by a graduate student," said Nair, who with two
graduate students is Anderson's collaborator in the sensor project. Nair and
Anderson wrote a proposal that led to a $56,000 grant from UAH's University
Research Infrastructure Initiative. UAH graduate students Aaron Kaulfus and
Brian Freitag field tested the sensor network and are testing computer models
that could be linked to the network to provide the capability to predict
landslides.
While that might have been enough money to buy one or two traditional
sensor kits, they bought enough parts to build about a dozen of the cell
phone-based instrument packages. The power supply is camping lantern batteries
recharged by solar cells. Because the instruments are small and energy
efficient, the solar arrays needed to keep the batteries charged are small.
Because cell phone service is now available in many undeveloped areas
where regular hard-wire telephone lines were too expensive to install (and
satellite phone service is available almost everywhere), these sensors could have
use far beyond monitoring landslides. The NASA/USRA team has installed a set of
similar sensors in Bangladesh to provide flood monitoring and warnings.
Nair is interested in the potential value these sensors might have in
two of his ongoing research programs: forecasting the spread of smoke from
planned forest fires and studying weather patterns around Mount Kilimanjaro in
Africa. In both cases, being able to set out a network of low-cost sensors
without hard wire connections could be useful.
"You can create a network and monitor the whole thing," he
said. "You can also have a small microprocessor on site to run models and
analyze the data as it's coming in. That gives you the ability to do things
like provide real-time warnings without needing a person in the loop 24-7. If
you have the network there, it can collect the information and do all the
processing. It does all it needs to do right there."
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials
provided by University of Alabama Huntsville.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further
information, please contact the source cited above.
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