Not all the news about California water supplies is bad. NewScientist (22 October 2016) reports on a new tool in water management being deployed in the Sierra Nevadas – a sensory net:
In an attempt to take control of the state’s water cycle, a project called SierraNet is covering California’s mountains with networks of sensors. It will report snow and water conditions in unprecedented resolution, and allow monitoring of the unpredictable watersheds. The data will help California to manage its water and the hydroelectric dams that depend on it.
“We’ve operated our water systems by the seat of our pants for the past century,” says Roger Bales, a civil engineer at the University of California, Merced, who jointly leads the project. “We’ve operated with very little information, because there was plenty of water and not that many people.”
SierraNet distributes a mesh network of sensor packages that measure snow depth, humidity and air temperature, as well as solar radiation, soil temperature and soil moisture content. These sensor packs use a low-powered radio to relay the data they gather back through the mesh to a higher-powered base station.
The cost of not doing so?
California’s drought and the accompanying drop in hydroelectric generation is costly both for the economy and the environment, according to an analysis by Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute think tank in Oakland, California. In the four years to September 2015, hydropower was down so much that it cost Californian ratepayers about $2 billion more over that period for their electricity, Gleick writes. “The additional combustion of fossil fuels for electric generation also led to a 10 per cent increase in the release of carbon dioxide from California power plants.”
SierraNet map. Source: UCB / UC-Merced
The University of California-Berkeley provides a map and real-time chart here. They also note some of the existential problems:
Dense forests make a challenging environment for WSNs [Wide area Sensor Networks]. A wild fire once ravaged an entire WSN (Duncan Peak). On a similar note, strong winds led to the collapse of a tree on one of the basestations.
