The SensorScope project is a collaboration between environmental scientists and hardware/software engineers at EPFL that aims to study the energy exchanges and balances at the earth/atmosphere boundary. It consists of two large-scale outdoor sensor networking deployments, the first on the EPFL campus, and the second on an alpine glacier. The current deployments are the one at Grand-St-Bernard pass at 2400 m between Switzerland and Italy, and the deployment on a rock glacier located at 2500 m on the top of Le Génépi above Martigny in Switzerland. These deployments measure key environmental quantities at high spatial resolution for the purpose of modeling and understanding this energy exchange.

The first step of the project consists in designing a complete weather station with communication and sensing capabilities that will be the core component of SensorScope. The design of the weather station needs to consider the entire chain of requirements for a scientific atmospheric measurement campaign, including packaging, energy autonomy, sensor placement and a diverse set of sensors.

The second part consists in the sensor units deployment and the data collection. The weather station designed in the first part of the project will be installed at multiple locations in each of the deployments. The weather stations will periodically collect data from the sensors and transmit it to one or several basestations.