Mountainous Ecosystem Sensor Array (MESA): a mesh sensor network for climate change research in remote mountainous environments
Abstract
Developing sensor networks robust enough to perform unattended in the world's remote regions is critical since these regions serve as important benchmarks that lack anthropogenic influence. Paradoxically, the factors that make these remote, natural sites challenging for sensor networking are often what make them indispensable for climate change research. The MESA (Mountainous Ecosystem Sensor Array) project has faced these challenges and developed a wireless mesh sensor network across a 660 m topoclimatic gradient in a wilderness area in central Idaho. This sensor array uses advances in sensing, networking, and power supply technologies to provide near real-time synchronized data covering a suite of biophysical parameters used in ecosystem process models. The 76 sensors in the network monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, humidity, air and soil temperature, soil water content, precipitation, incoming and outgoing shortwave and longwave radiation, snow depth, wind speed and direction, and leaf wetness at synchronized time intervals ranging from two minutes to two hours and spatial scales from a few meters to two kilometers. We present our novel methods of placing sensors and network nodes above, below, and throughout the forest canopy without using meteorological towers. In addition, we explain our decision to use different forms of power (wind and solar) and the equipment we use to control and integrate power harvesting. Further, we describe our use of the network to sense and quantify its own power use. Using examples of environmental data from the project, we discuss how these data may be used to increase our understanding of the effects of climate change on ecosystem processes in mountainous environments. MESA sensor locations across a 700 m topoclimatic gradient at the University of Idaho Taylor Wilderness Research Station.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFMIN41C1617R
- Keywords:
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- 0429 BIOGEOSCIENCES Climate dynamics;
- 1694 GLOBAL CHANGE Instruments and techniques;
- 1895 HYDROLOGY Instruments and techniques: monitoring;
- 1807 HYDROLOGY Climate impacts