June News

Big Data from small sensors! We’ve just completed another successful ground monitoring campaign using our low-cost GNSS (GPS) units. The program, which provides post-earthquake monitoring of an urban area in the Mediterranean region, has now spanned many months of continuous, autonomous deployment – we have just re-visited all the sites after a gap of seven months of unattended operation to find that all units have remained fully functional for the entire project duration.

The GNSS network we’ve employed consists of solar-powered units equipped with our latest hardware and software configuration, and has delivered locational data with high spatial precision (~cm) and temporal resolution (every second). Data from each receiver are streamed in near-real time via GSM to our bank of processing servers in the UK. In-built storage redundancy provides extra resilience through data-mirroring, so that even if (when!) GSM connectivity drops-out, full data integrity is maintained.

The low-cost GNSS technology has proven to be very versatile: as well as infra-structure monitoring, our networks have been used to detect ground movement associated with onshore gas storage, and monitoring of co-seismic and post-seismic sequences – all at exceptionally low-cost in comparison with operation of conventional permanent GPS reference stations.

One of our upcoming deployments will target monitoring of an area of active volcanism. If you have other research or commercial projects that could benefit from this technology, please get in touch to discuss your ideas!

Checking a low-cost, solar-powered GNSS unit – still running smoothly after 7 months of unattended, autonomous deployment.