Monitoring in a High-Arctic Environment: Some Lessons from MANA

• Main Author: Marcus Chang
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; East Greenland; Global warming
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.414.5572; http://www.itu.dk/people/phbo/Slides/mana-lessons.pdf

Monitoring terrestrial high-arctic ecosystems is important because of their great exposure to global warming. It is also very challenging because the high-arctic is a remote region, with extreme weather, and no communication infrastructure. In the MANA project, we tackle the challenges of monitoring in a high-arctic environment. We designed, built, and deployed a sensor network based data acquisition system for yearround lake monitoring in North-East Greenland. In this paper, we describe our system design and report the lessons we learnt from the first year of deployment. We emphasize the issues we underestimated initially: i.e., the consequences of operating in a remote region, the impact of extreme weather not only on system design but also on operator activities, and the demands that derive from the absence of communication infrastructure. We also reflect on the supremacy of Murphy’s law for unattended systems operating in hostile environments and on what it means for system design. 1