Project ID: 2005IA81B

Title: Sensors for CyberEngineering: Monitoring and Modeling the Iowa River for Nutrients and Sediments

Project Type: Research

Start Date: 03/01/2006

End Date: 02/28/2007

Congressional District: IA 1st

Focus Categories: Nutrients, Sediments, Water Quality

Keywords: water quality, monitoring, nutrients, sediments, sensors, modeling

Principal Investigator: Schnoor, Jerald L.

Federal Funds: $18,754

Non-Federal Matching Funds: $43,000

Abstract: The initial goal of this research is to use environmental cyberinfrastructure (sensors, servers, models and high performance computing) to construct an environmental cyberinfrastructure platform to analyze water, sediment, and phosphorus transport at the hillslope scale in an important agricultural setting. Following this research, we plan to scale-up to the whole watershed (Clear Creek) and river basin scales (Iowa River Basin). In the first year of the research, we began to deploy sediment and water quality sensors, to construct a digital database of the watershed, and to integrate spatially-distributed models to improve our ability to forecast (in near real-time) critical events that transport water, sediment, and phosphorus at the hillslope scale. We have begun to instrument, observe, test, and retrieve remotely-sensed information and link it to numerical models of these processes. In the second year, we will continue to instrument 3 subplots of 100 x 100 m in CRP land, row crop (corn-bean rotation), and flood plain (barren) to better understand land cover and land use effects on water, sediment, and phosphorus transport.

Another important goal of this proposal is to bring together key researchers in Environmental Engineering and the Hydrologic Sciences at the University of Iowa (UI) to create the first node of an Environmental Hydrologic Observatory (EHO) for the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB). The research contributes to the understanding, analysis, and modeling of water, sediment, and phosphorus transport in conjunction with Best Management Practices on row crop, barren ground, and fallow fields. Data and models are being linked in a real-time environmental cyberinfrastructure (CI) platform to test capabilities and limitations of the existing sensors for inclusion in the overall Environmental Hydrologic Observatory. As the EHO is built and grows, additional processes will be added and analyzed in real-time, and these elements of the observatory will become embedded into the backbone of the overall observatory. Likewise, new investigators and agencies will be added to enhance the research results as the scale of the processes investigated by the EHO grows beyond this proposal. ISWRII funding for the second year will allow us to install new nutrient sensors and to integrate our real-time streaming data with water quality models.

Progress/Completion Report, PDF