Wireless Weather Sensor Networks for Fire Management

Project details
The National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis is working on a network to provide integrated, real-time fire weather information during wildland fire incidents. In 2005, under a National Science Foundation grant, the NCLFA partnered with the Tiny Operating System (TinyOS) group in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at the University of Colorado to devise a wireless sensor system to take temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction readings. During the Selway-Salmon Complex fires of 2005, the NCLFA and TinyOS successfully developed and deployed a self-configuring wireless sensor system that can be remotely monitored and reprogrammed by fire personnel. That system used directional radios and, at the end points, a multi-hop sensor network to provide environmental data and web-enabled surveillance cameras to provide visual data back to base camp — all off-the-shelf technology. Deploying the system in a remote, wilderness setting required a satellite transceiver to access the internet, solar panels and large batteries, protective casings around the web cams and radio equipment, and sensor nodes powered by AA batteries (battery type most commonly used in other firefighting equipment). The system addresses the potential for asynchronous links and interference by configuring the sensors to send messages multiple times.

Building on that successful deployment, NCLFA’s researchers now aim to build simpler, cheaper, more robust weather instruments to expand topographic gradients — mountaintop to mountaintop supplemented with information across an environmental gradient. The next generation of the sensor network will monitor temperature, RH, wind speed, wind direction, leaf wetness, soil moisture, precipitation (liquid), barometric pressure, lightning and solar radiation. 

Principal Investigator: Carl Seielstad