GLACIER-HYDROLOGIC PROCESSES GENERATE GEOSPATIAL DATA COLLECTED WITH WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS, LEMON GLACIER, JUNEAU, ALASKA

The Lemon glacier system (Juneau, AK) has been the focus of mass balance studies since the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957-58. Fifty years later during the IPY (2007-08) installation of a sensor web built on a wireless network is underway throughout this glacier-watershed, the technology backbone of the SouthEast Alaska MONitoring Network for Science, Telecommunications, and Education Research, the SEAMONSTER project ( http://robfatland.net/seamonster). Data are funneled to a Database/Server through the wireless backbone from a watershed-scale diaspora of instruments including GPS, geophones, digital photography, meteorologic stations, and a suite of stream state and water quality sensors. This information is being used to characterize instantaneous events especially glacier lake outburst flooding, ice crevassing, glacier surface velocity, meltwater stream discharge, and regional seismicity linked with synoptic weather data collected at alpine altitudes within the study area. Collaborating investigators can install field-hardened instruments with power into the SEAMONSTER infrastructure and subsequently receive data via email or a simple web service on a continuous basis. This brings data acquisition into the regime of ‘real-time', reduces field travel costs and enables office monitoring of field sensor health. Tools available to collaborators include environmental hardening methods, power management electronics for extended deployment (years), moderate bandwidth data return, extended-distance deployments (tens of km), and freely available data from all other sensor web components. The SEAMONSTER web will expand geographically over the next decade to a succession of glacier valleys adjacent to the Lemon Creek watershed as well as into the coastal marine environment of the Alexander Archipelago. The monitoring of rapidly changing regional hydrology and glacial processes in watersheds in various states of deglaciation is undertaken towards a synopsis of millennial-scale processes. Resultant georeferenced datasets will be available through the University Alaska Southeast node of the Geographic Information Network of Alaska (http://gina.uas.alaska.edu) and through the Microsoft “Sensor Map” Virtual Earth interface (http://atom.research.microsoft.com/sensormap/) to research and science education communities.