Swiss Experiment: a New Environmental Monitoring Platform in Alpine Environment
Abstract
The emerging awareness of global change clearly shows the need for an innovative way of monitoring the environment in order to better characterize and understand the undergoing change. The Swiss Experiment (SwissEx) aims at being an important trigger for the creation of a new community involving the public, environmental and IT scientists and decision makers. The main SwissEx goal is to enhance our understanding of what environmental change means for alpine society from local to regional scales and identify key mechanisms involved in natural hazards, using new generation of wireless and inexpensive sensor network technology and associated models. To investigate the spatial and temporal variability of environmental variables and in particular to analyse the water budget of an alpine area, a massive amount of in-situ observations have been collected in a Swiss watershed (Dranse, Valais). This field deployment is composed of 40 Sensorscope stations that wirelessly measure air, soil and surface temperature, soil moisture, net radiation, precipitation, wind speed and direction, 3 disdrometers that collect information on the number, the size and the speed of raindrops, an optical fibre that can identify the river exchange with the groundwater and a scintillometer that can measures atmospheric turbulence and fluxes. This contribution presents preliminary results from this field campaign.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2007
- Bibcode:
- 2007AGUFM.H13A0968L
- Keywords:
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- 0496 Water quality;
- 1806 Chemistry of fresh water;
- 1830 Groundwater/surface water interaction;
- 1876 Water budgets;
- 1894 Instruments and techniques: modeling