Floating Sensors

Video recordings

clean fresh water is one of our most critical resources everybody needs drinking water

the floating sensor network gives us a new tool

for understanding how we can manage this precious resource

traditionally people build stationary sensors they build places on the side of the river that

measure things

it watch the water go by

our perspective our approach

is to put all the sensor into the river and let it flow with the

rubber

so that it traces where the water moves as it goes through

rivers and s two ares and deltas

we need to know where the water goes and we need to know how it

carries things through the doctor how to carry saltwater how it carries pollution we need

to know these things so that we can make environmental management decisions

about where the water should go

and how we can manage to delta and then watch which way they go into

the georgia anna for the sacramento river

floating sensors allow us to trace the movement of packets of water through the system

so that we could understand where the saltwater goes

and where the freshwater goes

how they meet

how they mix

and where the end up

we throw one hundred of these sensors be in and they transmit their location back

to us so we can watch the movie into the delta

i because they're carry by the water

where they are going is where the water is going

every drifter tells us that time when it records a gps location and the position

that it was in when recorded that information

when experiment is complete

we gather them all up

take them home and work with the data to build a picture of what's happening

in the top

inside we have

a little bit of balanced

a battery so that lasts a long time

and the cell phone

remote an android out that ones on the smart phone there's the gps position and

transmitted back to our servers

we also have sensors that contain water quality sensors themselves

that measure the salt content

or the pollution content of the water directly

we can find out which areas

threatened are fresh water supply before catastrophe occurs

this tool will give managers better information so that they can make better decisions

about how to take care of are fresh water resources in a way that satisfies

everyone