Real-time Networked Coastal Erosion Monitoring System

Radio provides reliable wireless communications in complex subsea environments such as shallow water and in the surf zone, making it ideally suited to coastal erosion monitoring applications.

More than half of the world's population lives within 60km of a coastline zone. As changing global climate and rising sea levels speed up coastal erosion, researchers need to monitor what is happening beneath the surface of the sea. Understanding coastal erosion has typically been by observation and measurement of exposed coastal areas rather than using quantitative data. The estimation of these effects has left us with only partial picture of what is really happening.

Historically, placing seabed instrumentation in the coastal erosion zone has proved challenging. Seabed located sensors can be deployed to gather data, but provide no real-time data visibility and so may be subject to failure or movement in the dynamic environment. Wired systems have been attempted, but the deployment of a buried cable from shallow-water, up the beach means a considerable investment for each monitoring node and is prone to failure. The use of radio based wireless technology to relay data provides a robust, reliable and low cost real-time data monitoring solution, permitting remedial action to protect the coastline to be taken at the earliest opportunity.

Ian Crowther, Senior Vice President & General Manager for WFS Energy & Environment recognises the technology's application to a number of environmental applications aside from coastal monitoring;
"With the ability to deploy rapidly and send data to end users efficiently, this system can support any number of environmental applications and will reduce the costs associated with installation of cabled data methods. The system's versatility and the availability of different types of sensor means that in addition to coastal erosion information, flood data, pollution levels, tidal patterns and water quality data can be recorded, providing time-critical information to monitor, protect, and control coastal and marine environments".