Instrumenting the earth: next-generation sensor networks and environmental science

Increasing environmental challenges worldwide and a growing awareness of global climate change indicate an urgent need for environmental scientists to conduct science in a new and better way. Existing large-scale environmental monitoring systems, with their coarse spatiotemporal resolution, are not only expensive, but they are incapable of revealing the complex interactions between atmospheric and land surface components with enough precision to generate accurate environmental system models. This is especially the case in mountainous regions with highly complex surfaces—the source of much of the world’s fresh water and weather patterns. The amount of data required to understand and model these interactions is so massive (terabytes, and increasing) that no off-the-shelf solution allows scientists to easily manage and analyze it. This has led to rapidly growing global collaboration among environmental scientists and computer scientists to approach these problems systematically and to develop sensing and database solutions that will enable environmental scientists to conduct their next-generation experiments.