Water-Air Quality Sensing Project (WASP)
PI: Rob Kelly
The Water-Air Quality Sensing Project 0NASP) is a prototype effort to employ water-based platforms to deploy sensors that provide real-time monitoring of water and air quality. The system was developed with the Marine Sciences Research Center (MSRC) and deployed on a local ferry. The ferry houses all the sensors and the computers used to collect and transport the data to a project ground station. Collected data includes near-surface atmospheric wind, pressure, temperature, relative humidity, solar and infrared radiation and rainfall, as well as near-surface water temperature and salinity and surface-to-bottom current profiles. The sensor information is collected and transmitted back to the MSRC in real-time via wireless communication where one-minute average values are archived and made available through a Web interface. The WASP prototype can be expanded to include other environmental sensors relevant to homeland security (e.g., other sources of radiation, atmospheric aerosols, marine toxins, etc.) with enhanced forms of data redundancy, access, and analysis features. (NYSTAR)