Crowd-Sourced Environmental Sensing and Terrain Analysis Using Mobile Devices

The objective of this project is to improve situational awareness of weather impacted terrain conditions in the battlespace. Our technical approach exploits crowd-sourced data available from existing sensors on mobile devices. Creare is developing these capabilities within the Crowd-Sourced Terrain Analysis for Geospatial Enterprise (CSTAGE) software framework. CSTAGE provides capabilities for measuring, staging, assimilating, and exploiting in-the-field environmental data available from available sensors on Soldier-worn mobile devices such as Nett Warrior. Under our Phase I effort, Creare proved technical feasibility by developing and demonstrating a full-featured prototype crowd-sourced geospatial enterprise software framework. During Phase II, we will build upon our Phase I results to refine and implement the CSTAGE software framework for deployment on representative mobile devices used by the Army, demonstrate crowd-sourced collection of weather-related and other data from these devices to populate a cloud-based geospatial data repository, implement physics-based and machine learning algorithms to derive enhanced environmental parameters from the crowd-sourced sensor data; generate high-resolution nowcasts and forecasts through data assimilation of crowd-sourced observations into numerical weather models, demonstrate the improved quality of the high-resolution nowcasts and forecasts relative to operational gridded weather data products, and deliver CSTAGE to the Army for technology demonstration and evaluation.