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NASA's Sensor Web
ddtstudio writes "PC Mag has a story about the Sensor Web: 'a cutting-edge application of networked sensor technology currently on the fast track at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).' Not only a new way to test tech, but also perhaps a pervasive and inexpensive way to explore remote places such as Antarctica -- or Mars."
i was thinking you could set up a network of these at traffic intersections to determine the optimal stoplight pattern. but has anything already solved that?
We can already track weather patterns all over the planet. The trouble is that this does not really solve the problem of predicting what will happen in the future - there are simply too many unkown factors affecting weather patterns for us to understand how and why they do what they do at this point. This isn't to say that a worldwide network of these semsors wouldn't be helpful, I just don't think they would solve the problems we have - satellites already give us a lot of worldwide data, but our weather forecasts beyond a few days out are still pretty unreliable (and often over much shorter time periods). If we want better weather forecasting we need to put more effort into figuring out all the factors that affect weather, which will probably require huge leaps in processing power over what is currently available - many of the world's most powerful supercomputers are already used for atmospheric modelling.
These things should have Internet presense, of course. Otherwise what are they really good for? Given the sort of things they might be used for, I can see 4 billion IP addresses being used up real quick! And putting them on the Internet seems like a really small step from what is described in the article (I didn't follow the rest of the links... maybe they are already doing this?).
If this sort of thing becomes ubiquitous, they could be really useful for a lot of things that we don't tend to like: e.g. surveillance.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Sensor webs are not used so much for predicting weather as they are for inexpensively recording a fairly wide range of environmental conditions at a resolution (temporal, geographic, etc.) far greater than can be achieved by satellite monitoring.
For instance, a sensor web could be spread over a 100 square mile area around a waste dump to help determine the regional impact of high carbon dioxide concentrations and other gasses leaching into the surrounding environment on a seasonal basis.
Or, another type of sensor web could be setup in a metropolitan area to measure the impact of environmental pollution laws and programs before and after they are implemented. For instance, in the San Francisco Bay Area, does a "spare the air" marketing campaign have a material impact on air quality within a few hours of being broadcast? Or, would other types of campaigns to achieve the same goals be more effective. It seems that an appropriately configured sensor web could provide firm data to answer such difficult questions.
Predicting rain next week is a very small aspect to the overall benefit of developing low-cost, commodity sensors that can be deployed in the manner described in the article. The exciting part is the technology is standardized, inexpensive, redundant, and easy to configure to continuously measure the specific aspects of an environment at whatever resolution is required.
The biggest current bar to giving a bigger warning lead time to tornadoes is the lack of raw data on the vortex and the variables affecting it. This could prove very handy in studying that, and much better than the current system of chasing storms and praying to get close at the right time.