|
|
Cycle 2 (2012 Deadline)
Evaluating climate change impacts on the arid lands and water resources in Jordan PI: Yaser Jararweh (Jordan University of Science and Technology) U.S. Partner: G. Darrel Jenerette (University of California, Riverside)
Project Dates: August 2013 to December 2015 Project Overview
In Jordan, more than 75% of the land is arid or semi-arid, and it is estimated that only 7% of the country's land is arable. Jordan faces many environmental challenges, including limited natural freshwater resources, desertification, and endangered species. These challenges are further compounded by factors such as a rapidly expanding population, industrial pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intermittent unrest. The impacts of climate change are only likely to aggravate the situation further in the future. This project aimed to design an intelligent system to monitor and track environmental changes in Jordan, evaluating the impact for various regions and classifying them accordingly. The overarching objective of this project is to enhance the capabilities and options for Jordanian government agencies and decision makers to help them better understand and respond to climate change. This includes identifying environmentally threatened regions and resources and proposing immediate reverse actions to prevent possible environmental declines for the other regions. To address these goals, the researchers developed foundations, principles, and metrics to assess vulnerability, impacts, problems, and variations to climate change in the arid and semi-arid lands of Jordan. From these metrics, they built integrated assessment models for the impacts of climate change on arid lands, vegetation, animal species diversity and distribution, water resources, hydrology, land topography, and pollution, as well as human adaptations to these changes. The PEER project also aimed to build an environmental monitoring infrastructure to collect environmental data, to be used with various other data sources such as satellite imagery, sensor networks, pollution statistics, and historical data sets.
Final Summary of Project Activities
The researchers built three sensor networks within different locations on the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) Campus, with the sites selected in consultation with the U.S. partner during his exchange visit. The sensor nodes were designed and developed through a collaboration between the PEER researchers and a small electronics company in Jordan (including a team of five engineers and designers) with a cost of less than $300 per node, while the price of the same node in the world market was more than $550 at the time of the project. The researchers also collected data from stations managed by the Ministry of Agriculture near the JUST campus to compare with data collected inside. The team also conducted several surveying studies and awareness sessions for climate change at the university level. Results of the project were presented at several conferences, including the 2014 IEEE/ACS 11th International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications, the IWA Water and Development Congress, Arab-American Frontiers Symposium, and the International IBM Cloud Academy Conference. The PI Dr. Jararweh and his team also worked with JUST, the Royal Scientific Society, and the University of California, Riverside intellectual property team on filing a patent based on the PEER project, entitled "Energy Optimized Design for Networked Environmental Sensors."
On the capacity-building front, the project helped several Master’s students to conduct large-scale sensor experiments using sensor stations and led some of them to explore new ideas for their theses. The PEER project has also influenced the curriculum of three graduate level courses taught by the PIs.
Publications
Yaser Jararweh, Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub, Izzat Alsmadi, and Darrel Jenerette. 2015. Climate Change above the Cloud: Accelerating Climate Change Research with Cloud Computing Infrastructure. Proceedings of ICACON 2015: 3rd International IBM Cloud Academy Conference.
Manar Jaradat, Moath Jarrah, Abdelkader Bousselham, Yaser Jararweh, and Mahmoud Al-Ayyoud. 2015. The Internet of Energy: Smart Sensor Networks and Big Data Management for Smart Grid. Procedia Computer Science 56: 592-597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.07.250
Yaser Jararweh, Ala Darabseh, Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub, Abdelkader Bousselham, Elhadj Benkhelifa. 2015. Software Defined Based Smart Grid Architecture. Proceedings of the Conference: Second International Workshop on Internet of Things, Systems, Management and Security (IoTSMS). https://doi.org/10.1109/AICCSA.2015.7507269
Yaser Jararweh, Izzat Alsmadi, Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub, Darrel Jenerette. 2014. The Analysis of Large-Scale Climate Data: Jordan Case Study. Proceedings of the 11th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA'2014). https://doi.org/10.1109/AICCSA.2014.7073211
|
|
|
|
