Changing weather patterns, increasingly impervious urban surfaces, and deteriorating stormwater drainage infrastructure has increased the likelihood of flooding in urban areas and generated higher variability in flow dynamics. An improved understanding of urban hydrology through continuous, real-time monitoring is required to determine the root causes, associated impact, and methods of mitigating inundation. During Phase I, a new and innovative Urban Hydrology Measurement Sensing Suite (UHMSS) will be developed with the capablity of improving the spatial characterization of urban flow by measuring parameters such as depth, flow, and temperature and wirelessly transmitting the data for real-time monitoring. UHMSS will enable highly-detailed and low-latency hydrologic information gathering by developing a robust, low-power, low-cost sensing suite which can be deployed as a distributed network across heterogeneous environments. This adaptable, less than hockey puck sized, in situ streamflow sensing device will also contain the key benefits of determining absolute location (GPS), orientation with respect to true North, and location with respect to other nearby devices through the establishment of an ad hoc network. The complete UHMSS system will allow for autonomous distributed operation allowing for a systemic understanding of urban hydrology without introducing concerns related to laws, regulations and privacy. The technological benefits of this technology include the development of an urban ad hoc hydrology measurement network that will have the ability to be applied to a variety of other monitoring and information distribution systems. Monitoring can be applied to other climate-related parameters such as animal populations/concentrations or vegetation status (water, air temperatures). The developed sensor suite will improve community scale resilience, increase an understanding of infrastructural requirement changes and can be used to develop early-warning flash flooding systems.
