Week 5! Half way through the REU experience!

On Monday we had a phone conference with Evan Maller from Georgia Tech.  They have been monitoring Urban Heat Islands in Atlanta, GA for a couple of years now.  Fascinating discussion of his work and tips that he shared with us. From the map below, you can see the “hot” and “cool” spots in the city as measured through Georgia Tech’s monitoring system.  What I found most interesting was the cooling effect of a “green bridge” across the interstate highway.  If you look at the highway running north/south across the right side of the photo, you will see red “hot” spots at intersections at the top of the screen and just off the bottom of the screen.  Highways, with the combination of impervious surfaces reflecting heat and the waste exhaust heat from motor vehicles, are particularly notorious for being urban heat islands.

However, if you note the intersection on the same highway in the middle of the screen, you will see the cooling effects of a green bridge.  This is so cool! Literally!

Here is a photo of the laser-cut identification tags that are on their HOBO U23’s on campus and around the Atlanta metro area. We will also create identification tags for our monitoring units.

Adding to the prototype HOBO units I constructed earlier is the Micro Station data logger, the last item on the right.  It will still require the solar radiation shield for the temperature and relative humidity sensor, but does not require the solar panel.

THE HOBO STATIONS HAVE BEEN ORDERED! Yes, I am more than a little bit excited about this news.  After weeks of extensive research, we have finally selected our initial equipment and have placed an order.  I can not wait to get the weather stations up and start collecting data.  Towards that end, we have confirmed our first monitoring site.  Lot G7 in the Willie Streeter Community Garden!

This location will be a fantastic location to monitor urban agriculture and the effect of vegetation on local microclimates. The plot is currently planted with buckwheat as a cover crop, but there is no harm in disturbing the crop or the surrounding soil, so this plot will be our “test bed” to practice installation of the soil moisture sensors before we move to on campus locations.  Of course, this means that we are a couple of weeks behind in the initial planned schedule, but hopefully some of the wearable sensors will arrive next week and we will be able to start get data collected from the wearable end of the project.  Update: It sounds like we will be able to install a monitoring station on the campus farm and are in works to install a monitoring station at the Bloomington Community Orchard as well.  The delays in getting started have been frustrating, but everything seems to be pulling together now.

Now that I’ve been through training for the 3-D Printers and Laser Cutter in the Maker Lab, I can start to work on designing signage for the monitoring stations.  Draft #1…

Of course, once I used scrap cardboard to cut a sample prototype on the laser cutter, it did not come out quite so clean (the default cardboard settings were a bit to high).  The actual signs will be cut from 2-layer acrylic, white with red lettering, and I will work on tweaking the laser cutter settings to make sure the actual signs present a professional image.

More good news! We have a graduate student, Danny Vu, that will help with building a website and building the back-end data base for storing the data.  The first draft of his website can be viewed at  http://cgi.soic.indiana.edu/~ddvu/wordpress/

My website is now under construction at www.susanmonsey.com.  I will post another link when the website is complete.

My reviewer-response table is stored in Box, at  https://iu.app.box.com/services/box_for_office_online/4881/299047292039/9b3390.4b0c7f3df265184e84b8e538651a02102aa30b683be433a66cf7e2eff6322334?node_type=file