US Army Corps of Engineers
Wireless telemetry for river gaging
The project was conducted by Stevens Water for the US Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit District, Lower Fox River Sub-Office, Kaukauna, Wisconsin. The project was simple in concept - replace eight wireline telephone modems and eight paper chart recorders for gaging stations along the Lower Fox River with wireless telemetry and DAQFactory supervisory data monitoring. The reasons that the Corps decided on this direction were:
1. To save money in manpower and utility costs. Cellular data plans are very inexpensive now and easily beat dedicated wireline circuits from the gages to the main office. In addition, having data available to field personnel while they "chase water" as they put it (manually adjusting the gates at the dams to control overall river flow) allows the staff to be more productive and waste less time driving back to the home office to look at the paper recorders.
2. Gathering and store more and better data about the river. The Corps is involved nowadays in a lot more environmental remediation projects, fish habitat projects, etc. Up until this project, they were simply logging the live reading from the paper recorders with a pen on a clipboard twice a day - once in the morning when they came to work, once in the evening before they went home. Now they have data available any time that can be analyzed easily with common tools like Excel.
3. To provide web-based and networked access to the river data 24x7 and allow the District office in Detroit to incorporate the Fox River data in to the master Great Lakes hydrological database.
So, the project consists of essentially four main thrusts:
- Cellular modems for wireless delivery of data
- Local data storage for backup and offline analysis
- Web output of river gage graphs, data tables and other information for USACE personnel now, possibly for the public later
- Specialized SHEF data output that conforms to the USACE Master Great Lakes Oracle database and is directly ingested in to that database hourly
DAQFactory is running the whole show and performs the following tasks:
- Raw data acquisition
- E-mail alarms to notify staff of high and low water conditions as well as return to normal for each site
- Five minute data averaging for the web-based graphs and tables
- Web output of the graphs and tables
- SHEF file creation and update once each hour
- Housekeeping tasks including:
- Monitoring for failure of network transfers of web and backup data: notifies the IT person at the Kewanee office by e-mail
- Monitoring for failure of a cell site - notifies staff by e-mail of "site missing for 12 hours"
- Monitoring of short term cellular network congestion - automatically restarts a connection if inbound data is more than 2.5 minutes old
- And of course, on-site display of the actual gages for office personnel.
USACE personnel are using the web data output the most. Each person has a Blackberry and the person who drives around adjusting the gates and doing maintenance has a Panasonic Toughbook on a RAM mount bolted to the dashboard - he can look at all of his sites any time he needs to and make the needed corrections.
Eventually - probably later this year or early 2009, the DAQFactory application data will form the basis of a full automation system that's currently being designed - it will automate the control of the dam gates along the river based on the level data we're providing.
-Ed Williams, Stevens Water Monitoring Systems, Inc.
Stevens Water website