With special reporting from Brad Floyd and Tabitha Motley.
The Rainbird Irrigation System on campus – operated by longtime SMU employee and current Southern Botanical employee Brian Martin – has a weather station that provides weather data to control irrigation schedules across The Hilltop. The weather station was originally installed at Ford Stadium, but due to the construction of the new Weber End Zone, OIT Infrastructure Engineer Scott Rice had the station temporarily moved to an area just outside of the northwest corner of the Tennis Complex. Its final (and current) location is in an open area just to the South of the Fondren Science Building. This is where it caught the attention of Chris Hayward and Cathy Chickering from the SMU Earth Sciences Department.
Chris and Cathy asked if they could get access to the data the station collects to help them with their acoustics research. According to Wikipedia, “Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids, including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound, and infrasound.” According to Cathy, the transmission of waves is significantly affected by factors such as temperature, humidity, wind, etc. The more locations across the research area (in this case, the SMU campus) that they can get weather measurements from, the more they can correlate the impact of weather on the acoustics of different wave transmissions.
We contacted the manufacturer of the weather station components and began working with Bruce Smith, a Senior Support Engineer from Campbell Scientific. Our goal was to maintain the integrity of the data and its input into the irrigation system while also providing the data to the Earth Science researchers. We found that we could reconfigure the components within the system to provide multi-user access, while still maintaining reliability for all users.
This is just one example of how OIT continues to harness our technology resources in new ways to serve our community!
