Technical Monitoring of Smart Storm Water Storage Systems

The infiltration of surface water and excess water from floods requires numerous measures to prevent and avoid side effects in the groundwater. Besides all these physical measures, intensified monitoring will be necessary. As part of the project SmartSWS, a monitoring system as a set of local sensors for quantitative and qualitative parameters combined with remote sensing data from unmanned aerial systems will be developed, to monitor test installations of small stormwater storage with infiltration capacity (SmartSWS) in Southern Germany. While current monitoring strategies are based on a thinned-out network of stationary sensors, the infiltration of excess water runoff into the groundwater layer to compensate for drought effects requires dense monitoring. While local sensor installations can only provide punctual information but on a continuous basis, remote sensing data provides spatial information for time intersects. The idea of monitoring such a SmartSWS is based on sensor fusion of these spatially and temporarily covering data with a low-cost sensor network covering the industrial communication standards to allow installations in small rural catchments. The isolated location and environmental impacts of the SmartSWS require a high degree of reliability of the installed hardware in such environments. Reliable measurements are also required so that the installations can be monitored remotely, and the systems can operate autonomously most of the time. This will provide the basis for Big Data processing methods and data analytics to efficiently prepare the data for visualization to monitor the condition of the facility in real time so that interventions and the effectiveness of the concept can be shown.