The National Weather Service needs to collect and disseminate large amounts of surface weather data to support mesoscale weather analysis and forecasting, as well as providing additional mesoscale data for local NWP modeling. Currently there is not a low-cost method to achieve this…data is collected by diverse partners and cannot easily be shared without the burden of recurring expenses for communications infrastructure. Digital packet radio transmission (hereafter "wireless") allows autonomous sensor nodes to collect weather (or any other) data and transmit this to a central base station for processing and Internet dissemination. Such wireless networks can be created for less than the recurring cost of telephone communications for comparable networks.

Such sensor nodes can define a wireless Environmental Sensor Network (ESN) which can withstand node failure while allowing new nodes to join at any time; this type of network has different requirements than the more common computer wireless LAN and the ubiquitous cellular phone networks. Essentially, for an ESN, the Java and Jini (www.jini.org) protocols allow for development of a robust, flexible wireless digital network topology when supported by additional communications protocols that will reliably continue to collect and distribute data, even in the face of temporary and permanent node failures. These low cost networks can be created for many ESN applications…from weather and river monitoring, to impromptu wildfire incident response networks, to emergency management of disaster incidents, to homeland security. The key to their universal adoption will be developing their communication and interoperation via standardized open-source protocols, allowing the utilization of existing infrastructure by new networks and the sharing of data via the Internet in near real time.

This presentation will demonstrate some of the capability of such a network developed by the University of North Florida's Applied Global Systems (AGS) Laboratory and the NWS WFO Jacksonville for Florida's Guana-Tolomato-Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTMNERR) under an NOAA HPCC Grant. Of particular interest is the novel microprocessor control of the packet-switching spread-spectrum radio by a Java-native microprocessor. This technology is also being implemented by the AGS Lab into the Florida Road Weather Information System (RWIS) under the iFlorida grant.