Natural disasters are escalating world wide due to many issues including climate change and perhaps the global warming. The losses due to these disasters are increasing at an alarming rate. Hence, it is would be valuable to detect the pre-cursors of these disasters, early warning of the people, a systematic method of evacuating them, and the most important in saving lives. However, these disasters are largely unpredictable and occur within very short spans of time. Therefore technology has to be developed to capture relevant signals with minimum monitoring delay. Wireless Sensor Network has come to stay as one of the cutting edge technologies that can quickly respond to rapid changes of data and send the sensed data to a data analysis centre in areas where cabling is inappropriate.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to envisage the recent dramatic disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet; mostly due to the uncertainties in modelling glaciers and ice sheets because of its basal boundary conditions. According to researchers, there is growing evidence that glacier movement are unpredictable as to the traditional belief that glaciers flows slowly and continuously. Therefore, glaciers are suggested to be modelled in a similar faction like earth quakes.

A new project that is funded from the Levehulme Trust titled “Investigating glacier stick-slip motion using a wireless sensor network has been initiated at the University of Southampton, headed by Dr Kirk Martinez. According to the expert, “We plan to use geophones, differential GPS to measure the “slip” and use an improved version of the multisensor Glacsweb probes within the ice and till (glacial sediment) to measure the “stick” phase”. The project so far has deployed a long-term sensor network using the latest technology available. WSN technology has the potential of quick capturing, processing, and transmission of critical data in real-time with high resolution. However, it has its own limitations such as relatively low amounts of battery power and low memory availability compared to many existing technologies. It does, though, have the advantage of deploying sensors in hostile environments with a bare minimum of maintenance. This fulfils a very important need for any real time monitoring, especially in hazardous or remote scenarios..
full article www.wsnmagazine.com/wsn-nodes-natural-disasters/