A high-precision and low-cost temperature and humidity logging device, called Niphargus and originally intended for environmental monitoring in caves, was developed at the Geological Survey of Belgium (Burlet et al., 2015). The Niphargus is designed as a standalone logger, with data to be retrieved manually whenever needed. This allows for a very small and simple electronic design, low power consumption and flexible placement. There are, however, a number of disadvantages for specific applications. For example, there is no feedback possible on malfunction or battery lifetime. To avoid loss of data during long-term measurement campaigns, regular inspection and data retrieval are necessary. Apart from the inconvenience, this manipulation also causes disturbance in the measurements. A new version of the Niphargus was therefore developed, including a wireless Digi XBee DigiMesh module. These modules communicate on a 868 MHz radio frequency, in a self-governing mesh network (Fig. 1). In such a network, every device is able to communicate to any other device within range. For data transmission, the most optimal pathway is chosen between transmitter and receiver. As such, in case of a single device malfunction, the connection between the other nodes can still be guaranteed. In case of the NiphNet, the receiving end includes a single-board computer with cellular network connectivity, from which data is uploaded to a cloud repository. From there, live monitoring data can be displayed online, downloaded and processed. A first successful test was conducted with a NiphNet of 5 devices in waterproof containers (Fig. 2) and online display at the GeoEnergy Test Bed in Nottingham, UK, in March 2018. Current and future efforts focus on the enclosure design and the automation of data readout over the network. There is a large array of possible applications. For environmental monitoring in caves, the individual nodes can ensure data transmission from a network of environmental sensors inside the cave to a station outside, allowing for continuous access to measurements and minimising the need for regular field inspection. This is currently being installed in the caves of Han. The geological storage of CO2 requires long-term monitoring to establish a baseline and detect leakage from the reservoir, both below and above ground. Such monitoring activities need to be maintained for several decades, and therefore need to be low effort and low cost. Near the surface, temperature is expected to be a good proxy for CO2 leakage when a network is set-up that can detect temperature anomalies in the range of 0.01°C. This is possible with a network of shallow buried Niphargus nodes. Then, wireless access to thesedevices is not only a matter of long-term and maintenance-free coverage of a large area. Detection of small temperature differences depends on not disturbing the shallow subsurface, and therefore on being able to download the data remotely.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2018
In case of maritime pollution, man-overboard, or objects adrift at sea, national maritime authorities of the 9 countries bordering the European North West Continental Shelf (NWS) rely on drift model simulations in order to better understand the situation at stake and plan the best response strategy. So far, the drift forecast services are mainly managed at national levels with almost no integration at the transnational level. Designed as a support service to the national drift forecasting services, NOOS-Drift has the ambition to change this paradigm. NOOS-Drift is a distributed transnational multi-model ensemble system to assess and improve drift forecast accuracy in the European North West Continental Shelf. Developed as a one-stop-shop web service, the service allows registered users (national drift model operators or trained maritime authorities) to submit on-demand drift simulation requests to be run by all the national drift forecasting services connected to NOOS-Drift. Within 15 minutes after activation, the NOOS-Drift users shall get access to the drift simulation results of the individual ensemble members, as well as the results of a multi-models joint analysis assessing the ensemble spread and delineating risk areas to locate possible maritime pollution. This operation of such a distributed multi-models service is to our knowledge a world premiere. In this communication, we will present the technical and scientific developments that had to be done to make this service possible, including: - a robust, secure and latency-free communication system that coordinates the execution of the different national models - a strategy to build the multi-model ensemble - a definition of drift forecast accuracy - the joint multi-model analysis tools - the standard file formats and visualisation means. Finally we will illustrate on an example how the NOOS-Drift service could change the decision making process.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2020
The North Sea is an epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, which connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the South and the Norwegian Sea in the North. It hosts key north European shipping lanes, and it is a major fishery and a rich source of energy resources, including wind, wave and solar power. Here we present a nested hydrodynamics model that is calibrated against in situ data for the year 2009, and validated for the years 2010, 2011 and 2015, which present a large range of contrasting North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) indices. Our results are openly available and provide 10+ years of hydrodynamics data (sea surface elevation, sea water velocity, potential temperature and salinity) with a resolution of 30 arcseconds in the Southern Bight of the North Sea, and 2 arcminutes elsewhere. With our model and resulting dataset, we aim at supporting marine research and policy in a highly, anthropogenically impacted system, allowing stakeholders to take informed decisions to sustainably manage its valuable resources.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2024
