Soil Temperature, Environment, and Moisture Monitoring Network—a low-cost sensing network for Alabama

In order to bolster drought assessment and forecasting capabilities in Alabama, The University of Alabama in Huntsville has developed a network of rapidly deployable, low-cost soil moisture, temperature, and environment monitoring stations (STEMMNet). This network provides near-real-time transmission of in-situ sensed, high temporal resolution soil data, offering an extension beyond climatological analysis into operational use. Stations are manufactured using commercially available, inexpensive hardware and use low-cost sensors which demonstrated comparable accuracy when evaluated against an existing research-grade soil moisture network. Months of testing in a variety of environments allowed for several system optimizations, yielding a robust network with a high uptime. Collaborations with outside agencies including Alabama Forestry and select National Weather Service offices proved the versatility and need for this network. This study aims to outline the design process, data flow, lab, and comparative performance analysis, network design, and outcomes of STEMMNet. Overall, the network has performed well and demonstrates the ability to obtain high-quality soil data from a low-cost, minimal footprint, rapidly deployable station.