Remote Sensing in the Arctic

Student: Mike Mobley

Faculty Advisor or Community Project Lead: Martin Cenek

Client Organization: Department of Homeland Security

Summary:

The purpose of this document is to describe, explain, and present the capstone project by Mike Mobley, Matthew Devins, and Lance Leber. The capstone project is titled Remote Sensing in the Arctic. The purpose of this project is to create a communications network capable of relaying sensor data back to a home base station for analyzation. This project is funded by the Department of Homeland Security as part of the Arctic Domain Awareness Center of Excellence.

• Motivation: With climate change having substantial effects in the arctic region, increased accessibility will impact how these areas are used. Commerce, research, and access to natural resources will result in a noteworthy increase of human traffic. The ability to monitor the impact of this activity is vital to help determine the environmental impact of the increased use.
• Problem Statement: The arctic region’s vast size coupled with the diversity of potential conditions to monitor requires a low cost option to detect conditional changes or events and isolate their locations within a reasonable area.
• Overview: This project consists of two major parts, the communication network and the simulator. The communication network is designed to be self-healing and operate in a hostile environment. Each node will be attached to a sensor type based on the application the network is intended for. We will test our network with audio sensors. If the node’s sensor detects an event, the node will append information to uniquely identify the event in a data structure and transmit the event to one of four readout nodes/stations for storage or analysis.

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