Environmental studies with the Sensor Web: Principles and practice

In 1997, the Sensor Web was conceived at the NASA/ Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to take advantage of the increasingly inexpensive, yet sophisticated, mass consumer-market chips for the computer and telecommunication industries and use them to create platforms that share information among themselves and act in concert as a single instrument. This instrument would be embedded into an environment to monitor and even control it. The Sensor Web's purpose is to extract knowledge from the data it collects and use this information to intelligently react and adapt to its surroundings. It links a remote end-user's cognizance with the observed environment. Here, we examine not only current progress in the Sensor Web technology, but also its recent application to problems in hydrology to illustrate the general concepts involved.