New User Facility for Environmental Sensing

Abstract

Hydrologic instrumentation is undergoing a transformative shift in its ability to concurrently measure scales from centimeters to kilometers [e.g., Selker et al., 2006]. To rapidly distribute and incorporate these advances in the Earth and hydrologic sciences, the U.S. National Science Foundation's Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities Program launched in September 2009 a community‐accessible instrument facility for distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and wireless networked environmental sensing.DTS systems for the facility use laser‐induced Raman backscatter (spectrally shifted scattered light whose intensity can be related to the thermal state of the optical fiber) to measure the distribution of temperatures along fiber‐optic cables up to 30 kilometers long. The DTS systems can measure temperatures along fiber‐optic cable with spatial resolution of less than 1 meter and with temperature resolution of ±0.01°C. In contrast to “single point in space” measurements of environmental temperatures or “single point in time” remote sensing of temperatures, DTS provides the opportunity to continuously monitor temperatures of air, water, soil, or snow at high spatial and temporal frequency without the need for a large network of measurement systems.