UW Facilities and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Piloting a Precision Landscape Irrigation Advisory System

University of Washington (Facilities) has to spend significant financial resources to efficiently manage the irrigation of campus landscape in Seattle during the months of summer and long periods of no precipitation. There is currently a smart irrigation idea that has been developed and implemented in developing nations based on satellite sensor data and internet of things (IoT). This concept has been piloted in India and the idea is well developed. However, the concept has not been fully calibrated and tested as an operational product for a user. In this Industry capstone, the student team will work to apply the same IoT concept to identify at timescales of daily to weekly the spots/regions on UW campus that need more urgent irrigation than others, thereby minimizing significant amounts of unnecessary irrigation and operational cost. The concept will use, as a baseline, a coarser scale and fully satellite/model based system called Integrated Rice Advisory System (IRAS; see http://depts.washington.edu/saswe/dae) that uses NASA Landsat/MODIS Thermal Infrared Data at 60-100 meter scale, NASA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission data at kilometer and NOAA Global Forecasting System (GFS) weather forecast data at kilometer scale. The scripts and tools for the fully satellite-based system are fully developed in user-ready format and have already been scaled, tested and currently are in mass use by governments of Pakistan and Bangladesh serving millions of farmers. A PhD-level UW graduate student from the PI’s research group – SASWE (www.saswe.net) will be available to provide training on IRAS and to mentor the student team. In Winter 2024 this student team will work to understand the fully satellite-based system and ways to customize it as an online dashboard for UW campus landscape. At the same time, this student team will work to install in-situ IoT sensors that measure soil moisture and air temperature at canopy level throughout the campus. WIN 2024 TASKS: #1 - Understand existing IRAS system in operation in Pakistan and Bangladesh; #2 - Understand the concept of IoT-based system piloted in India (called PANI); #3- Set up in-situ IoT sensors on soil moisture and temperature; #4- Customize the IRAS tool for UW campus for variety of plants (non-rice). In Spring 2024 the student team will work to integrate IoT data with the satellite-based coarser-scale irrigation system to downscale the information at hyperlocal plot scale. Spring 2024 TASKS: #5- Integrate IoT data into the satellite irrigation tool set up for UW campus to generate hyper-location information on irrigation status #6 – Assess the hyper local information’s quality #7 – Develop the online dashboard providing weekly to sub-weekly updates on irrigation status of UW landscape. The final deliverable of this project will be an online dashboard hosted at http://depts.washington.edu/saswe/ that will run during the months of summer (June to Sept) from 2024 for UW (Facilities) and that updates at weekly or sub-weekly timescales the irrigation status of UW campus landscape using satellites and IoT sensors. The intended goal the students are helping the organization achieve is to take advantage of in pilot mode in minimizing unnecessary irrigation and optimizing their irrigation schedules. FINAL DELIVERABLE DATE: June 15 2024 With minimum cloud cover and campus wide wi-fi, and 8 years of research and application into the satellite-based system in South Asia, we expect the proposed capstone project to be low risk – high payoff for University of Washington and for future clients and investors. At a minimum we expect to showcase the technology and share lessons learned (in terms of what worked and what did not; future work) with PEPSI CO and SoilTech Center’s Industry Advisory Board.

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