Subsurface hydrology

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) in Geoscience Miniseries – Part 3: Getting it all together – Cables, Breadboards and Circuit Boards

Jonas Pyschik May 9, 2024

You got all your components for your project, so now it’s all about getting it all together. Then it’s great to be able to quickly exchange components and change wiring. That’s where a so-called “breadboard” comes in handy. It’s an easy to use device where you can connect microelectronic components without the need to solder anything. Breadboards are like pinboards for cables and microelect ...[Read More]

Overlooked tips for the lost art of fieldwork

Natalie Ceperley February 29, 2024

The author finalizing installation of a meteorological station in the Vallon de Nant, just in the kink of time (before winter truly begins).

Not so long ago, almost all hydrologic data depended almost exclusively on fieldwork. Today, sure, you can download data from repositories, there are satellites that beam you magic numbers that you can interpret to give you almost any variable, and some (less than we might hope) long-term monitoring has been outsourced to governments (or in some cases to citizens with sensors). But somewhere in ...[Read More]

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) in Geoscience Miniseries – Part 2: Sensors & Electronics

Jonas Pyschik February 1, 2024

As a child, I was a huge fan of LEGO. I would spend hours building and creating structures, vehicles and landscapes. For every birthday & Christmas, I wished for the newest sets of these colorful plastic bricks. While building the sets manually was fun, creating something new from my own fantasy was even better. It seemed like once I had a substantial amount of different bricks, combination po ...[Read More]

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) in Geoscience Miniseries – Part 1: Microcontrollers

Jonas Pyschik November 30, 2023

We geoscientists need all different kinds of data: soil moisture, water-levels, snow height, radiation, precipitation height and the list goes on. However, the devices we need to generate that data are often too expensive, not available or even don’t exist. Therefore, it’s sometimes necessary to build them yourself (like many geoscientists do – those who annually present their senors p ...[Read More]