Air-Dropped Sensor Network for Real-Time High-Fidelity Volcano Monitoring

This paper presents the design and deployment experience of an air-dropped wireless sensor network for volcano hazard monitoring. The deployment of five stations into the rugged crater of Mount St. Helens only took one hour with a heli-copter. The stations communicate with each other through an amplified 802:15:4 radio and establish a self-forming and self-healing multi-hop wireless network. The distance between stations is up to 2 km. Each sensor station collects and delivers real-time continuous seismic, infrasonic, lightning, GPS raw data to a gateway.