SBIR-STTR Award

Actionable understanding of watershed and ecosystem behavior is required for a wide spectrum of societal and engineering needs by both government entities and commercial entities. These needs include, for example, water resource management, precision agriculture and hydropower. Such actionable understanding requires the ability to numerically model various coupled processes and associated reactions that occur across different temporal and spatial scales and data which can be used to parameterize these models. Current data acquisition systems do not provide the data required to investigate and understand tightly coupled surface/subsurface processes. A new hyporheic and riparian zone sensing system is being developed which collects key above and below ground data sets. The data from this system will be transmitted in real time to a cloud based data ingestion, management and visualization platform which will send information derived from this data to end users. In Phase I we will design and implement an initial version of our data acquisition system. We will test and validate this system in a number of representative scenarios. This system would allow watershed managers and farmers to collect the data required to understand subsurface processes in the hyporheic and riparian zone, and use this data for optimal management.