Research challenges in environmental observation and forecasting systems

We describe Environmental Observation and Forecasting Systems (EOFS), a new class of large-scale distributed system designed to monitor, model, and forecast wide-area physical processes such as river systems. EOFS have strong social relevance in areas such as education, transportation, agriculture, natural resource planning and disaster response. In addition, they represent an opportunity for scientists to study large physical systems to an extent that was not previously possible. Building the next generation of EOFS pose a number of difficult challenges in all aspects of wireless networking, including media protocols for long distance vertical communication through water, flooding algorithms in ad-hoc network topologies, support for rate- and time-sensitive applications, and location-dependent mobile computing.