Internet of Things. The Cloud. Having sensors do the work that humans used to, transmitting information, big data, to the cloud, can this enforce the Clean Water Act?I am excited to (finally) be working for an environmental agency. At this juncture in time, it is really like the 1980s (lets write all our software in house and debug it ourselves) and the 21st century (sensors, cloud, new technology), we have a chance to be like those African nations that have more cell phones than land line phones.
Oregon, as it turns out, has more stringent rules for gathering water quality compliance data than the federal EPA requires. However, possibly because we require so much data gathering, we have a hard time keeping up.
That is where the internet of things comes in (IOT, as it is affectionately known). Drop sentient and waterproof sensors in the "waters of the state", and collect "all" possible data about them. The data is transmitted to the computers in the cloud-sky, and available for us to see if the waters are getting better, or have noxious things in them that someone must pay
to clean up. Maybe it could even detect the forensic fingerprint of who dumped the noxious stuff.
Day 2 of my blog on climate change adaptation. Instead of lamenting the state of our rivers, lakes, ocean, waterfalls, forest ponds, car wash puddles, we get real-time data streams and can take enforcement action. Maybe the ocean has dead zones and we can encourage those fish to move along to someplace nicer. Or at least we could post temperature signs, like those smart highway signs, that notify the fish the water is 2degrees warmer than last week - they can decide 'Stay? Migrate? See what the other fish are doing?'
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