CDT Studentship in Developing pervasive sensor networks for high-resolution river flow measurements

Global climate change is exposing humanity to increasingly extreme weather extremes and related hazards such as floods and droughts. Mitigating these hazards will require developing much better flood and draught warning systems. A major obstacle to such development is the lack of adequate monitoring systems. This is particularly true for river flow monitoring. Worldwide, river flow gauging networks are in decline, because of the high costs of building and maintaining flow gauging infrastructure, as well other considerations such as their impact on stream ecology.

This project will explore the use of pervasive water level sensing networks in combination with advanced hydraulic monitoring as an alternative to classic hydrometrical methods. In a first part of the project, a robust and cost-effective wireless water level sensor network will be developed using cost-effective hardware solutions such as the Arduino platform and tested in laboratory conditions. The obtained results will be used for advanced hydraulic computer simulations to estimate the potential accuracy of the network to estimate river flow in natural conditions. In a last phase, an in-situ experiment will be set up to evaluate the performance of the sensors in real world conditions.