Iowa Flood Center seeks locations to deploy instruments for NASA project.
The Iowa Flood Center (IFC) will be collaborating with NASA in the spring of 2013 on Iowa Flood Studies or IFloodS – a project to enhance the understanding of precipitation events worldwide. NASA is planning the Global Precipitation Measurement multi-satellite mission for monitoring floods and management of water resources throughout the world.
Iowa Flood Center staff will be seeking locations on public and private land in northeast Iowa, focused mostly on the Cedar and Upper Iowa River basins south of Waterloo and west of Cedar Rapids which will include the following counties: Benton, Blackhawk, Grundy, Hamilton, Hardin, Iowa, Linn, Marshall, and Tama.
The instruments will be located on properties so as to not disturb any ongoing operations or landowner privacy. Depending on the type of instrument, certain amenities such as a power source or internet access may be required nearby.
Rain gauges, as shown above, are an example of the equipment that will be deployed for IFloodS.
Additional information regarding field instruments and site requirements for IFloodS can be found in the IFloodS Field Instrumentation Guide.
IFloodS is scheduled to occur during the spring of 2013 from April through June. Instruments could be deployed to field locations as early as mid-March, depending on the weather conditions. They will be installed and monitored by IFC and NASA personnel throughout the experiment.
Field data collected by the instruments will be available in real-time to researchers through a web-based interface (Internet browser) being developed by NASA and the Iowa Flood Center.
The Iowa Flood Center is part of IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering, a unit of the UI College of Engineering. The IFC was created in 2009 in the aftermath of the historic 2008 Iowa floods and is supported by state appropriations to improve flood monitoring and prevention in Iowa.
For additional information and serving as a host site for instrumentation devices, contact:
Sara Steussy, Iowa Flood Center, 319-384-1729, sara-steussy@uiowa.edu.