The creation, improvement and innovation of digital systems are a key part of the FDRI project. Our digital team have been hard at work creating cloud services, conceiving new approaches, sharing knowledge with the community and more!

FDRI Digital Prospectus

To explain the key deliverables and outputs of the FDRI Digital Research Infrastructure, we are creating a prospectus of the current and upcoming work, which has developed rapidly over the first year of implementation. We are excited to share the prospectus with you all in the coming weeks.

FDRI sensor data systems

FDRI is building cloud-based systems for receiving, storing, processing and sharing sensor data. This is currently using the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud and its Internet of Things (IoT) tools. In order to be ready in advance of instruments being installed and sending data from FDRI pilot sites, the system is currently using UKCEH’s COSMOS-UK data as example data.

An overview of the interactions between different systems within the FDRI programme
Overview of FDRI sensor systems. Green areas are running in the prototype, yellow in development, pink to be started in year 2.

User interface developments

An important part of the sensor data systems will be user interfaces (UI) for field engineers, to allow for real time checking of data to resolve issues as quickly as possible and minimise data gaps. An initial web-based interface has been developed and is being tested by FDRI field staff.

A screenshot of the new user interface for FDRI sensor data
A screenshot of the the real-time field engineers dashboard.

In May, we will host two workshops to develop ideas for the public user interfaces of the FDRI tools, and their user experience. These will consider UI design across the full range of digital products and builds on some existing work developing UI. 

Sensor metadata model

Metadata about FDRI sensors will be important to help users of the data find and make use of FDRI datasets. To enable rich descriptions of FDRI datasets we have been working with linked data experts Epimorphics to develop an approach, based on existing open standards, to describe the detail of FDRI measurements, from monitoring networks and sites, sensors and their makes and models, the accuracy and calibration history of those sensors, through to the programs used to process the data. 

A diagram illustrating the FDRI sensor metadata model
Summary of the FDRI sensor data model

 

Datasets in the pipeline

Two significant datasets are being prepared for publication.


Firstly, historic data from the Plynlimon research catchments, including sub-daily weather station and river flow data for multiple sites from the 1970s to 2010s has been collated and quality controlled.


Secondly, a dataset of 15-minute river levels and flows has been collated, with the help of UK measurement agencies (Environment Agency, Sottish Environmental Protection Agency, Natural Resources Wales, Department of the Environment Northern Irealnd), and is being quality controlled with the University of Newcastle for publication through FDRI to support new analyses of flood processes, flood risk and climate change. This will form the basis of a new sub-daily version of CAMELS-GB being prepared by Gemma Coxon at the University of Bristol and others.

Tech Corner

For those interested in the technical details of FDRI development, lead software engineer Dom Ginger is now sharing weekly developer updates via GitHub. Please sign up for alerts.

Key updates:

  • Phenocam images are now streaming into a linux server where we can write code and we have managed to upload some images ready to be served by an API.
  • Speeding up our ingester service for COSMOS-UK data from ~19 messages/min to ~960 messages/min.

All of these datasets will be made available under an open licence.