Sensor Networks Applied to Monitoring of climatic and hydrological variables: the case of the Soil Moisture Sensor

SANTIAGO SONDÓN; ANDRÉS AYMONINO; FAVIO MASSON; PABLO MANDOLESI

Bahia Blanca

Simposio; Metodos Experimentales en Hidráulica II; 2011

Instituto Argentino de Oceanografía

The strategic importance of water in daily life and production processes, as well as the ecological balance, requires a rational use of this non-renewable resource and continuous monitoring of watersheds that supply the populated regions. The modernization and provision of reliable information at the appropriate times can achieve this goal by encouraging decision making. One of the main demands of the sector is to have environmental variable data in real time over a wide geographic area. Through distributed sensor networks, in collaboration with other sources of information, it is possible to survey these variables, and make them available to relevant authorities for making decisions. In this paper we propose a network architecture and the design of a soil moisture sensor as the first wireless sensor developed for this purpose. The proposed network uses the cell phone structure for data transmission and Internet to deliver data to users. The goal is to collect through this network information produced by conventional meteorological sensors and local distributed subnets formed by soil moisture sensors. This sensor will define the precipitation-runoff and runoff mainly from subsurface (unsaturated zone). Different techniques such as low power design, data fusion and wireless communications are the basic tools of the proposed system. We conclude that the use of networks such as the proposed is a viable option for data gathering and processing of climatological and hydrological data, which may produce alerts or information of quality with minimal use of resources.