Elements: Innovating for Edge-to-Edge Climate Services

Environmental sciences have enormous potential to provide real-time community hazard information because of advances in cyberinfrastructure (CI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Real-time systems that observe and monitor hydrology, climate, geology, and ecology have historically been difficult to design, implement, and maintain, with challenges ranging from equipment cost to data management.

To make it easier for everyone to access the environmental data they need, this project focuses on “democratizing” portions of an existing regional earthquake and wildfire science network in Nevada by integrating new IoT technologies and cutting-edge cloud-ready CI. Together, these create transformative real-time “crowd-participating” environmental data services, assembled on a new Nevada Weather “edge-to-edge” platform, or “NevWx,” developed as part of the project.

These elements become community-centered solutions, in which any individual or organization can easily incorporate new sensors in the NevWx scientific platform. The project’s science application aims to shed new light into temperature patterns in and around mountain communities. This interdisciplinary work contributes new science and engineering knowledge along with new physical resources, which helps move forward the adoption and scalability of IoT in regional research and monitoring networks.

Given its emphasis on involving the public and local agencies in science, the project also offers an example for transforming societal engagement with research data networks. By incorporating research results in undergraduate and graduate courses at UNR and in training materials at the Nevada State Climate Office (NSCO), the project also provides substantial and unique educational and workforce development opportunities.

To “democratize” the existing regional science network, this project integrates Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) wireless and IoT-focused streaming data CI to create crowd-participatory environmental hazard data on the new NevWx workflow platform. The software and networking solutions are designed to enable any interested individuals to connect new sensors to the project’s infrastructure, register metadata, and freely access and share the data collected from them.

System testing consists of installing temperature sensors and network enhancements in urban and wildland areas in the Lake Tahoe Basin. The main components of this project are: (1) CI research, design & implementation, to facilitate data acquisition from sensors, conduct quality control, and make the data available through a web portal. Specific CI goals are: application of IoT topologies on regional infrastructure; development of containerized microservice-based software architecture to support data collection, storage, processing, and curation; and creation of crowd-participatory data services that incorporate FAIR data principles; (2) Research into how disturbance and development influence temperatures in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

This includes measuring urban heat island effects in a mountain community, comparing temperatures in recently burned areas to unburned forest, and tracking freezing levels along a major highway into the Lake Tahoe Basin. Tightly connected with CI research and development, the science applications allow testing the NevWx platform in a range of environments and seasons, while providing real-time information pertinent to public health and safety; and (3) Science stakeholder meetings, which are designed to evaluate their interests and preferences about the proposed sensor data and deployments.

Through its modern, flexible and adaptable solutions, available to a wide spectrum of researchers, individuals, and organizations, the project has the potential to advance the current state-of-the-art in CI and environmental sciences, help expand our national cyberinfrastructure on regional networks, and contribute to making significant steps towards “sensing by the public,” with benefits for many science communities and public service agencies.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.