Norwegian Land Stability Monitoring

Norwegian Water Resources & Energy Directorate (NVE) manages risks and provides early warnings for a wide range of geohazards including, among others, landslides, floods, rockfalls, snow avalanches, and rockfalls.  NVE is supported in this work by SINTEF, a specialized Norwegian research institute.

The client’s need

To implement an IoT-based monitoring system to monitor the stability of land in remote areas of Norway with reduced or no cell phone network coverage and where there is a demonstrably high risk of water-induced landslides.  The system needed to have low power consumption, long durability and low maintenance in harsh conditions, and support a very reliable and secure data transfer from sensors to users.

Our solution

The Insight Platform deployed for NVE has three key components:

⁃ Edge-based hardware, data collection, aggregation and data transfer

⁃ Cloud-based Insight Platform for near real-time data processing and management

⁃ Web-based customizable dashboard for visualization of remotely collected data which has been validated, enriched, curated and securely stored.

To address the need for reliable and resilient communications at this remote location, the solution also incorporates an all-weather telecommunications kiosk. The kiosk houses the edge compute node, power storage/management, LoRaWAN gateway and Inmarsat satellite terminal, and is supported by dual wind-turbines and PV solar arrays for totally independent remote operation.

How is NVE benefiting from our solution?

NVE wishes to enhance its existing landslide warning system and will investigate the potential of the Insight Platform to improve the accuracy of the current system. To assist NVE with this evaluation, SINTEF is performing a range of data analytics on the sensor data received by the Insight Platform to calibrate the NVE landslide prediction model.  This analysis is intended to detect and quantify the response of groundwater conditions to both rainfall and snowmelt, within a landslide risk assessment framework, thus ensuring more reliable and consistent landslide predictions and improved risk management.

SINTEF has assessed the Insight Terra Insight Platform and its integrated resilient Inmarsat satellite connectivity as an:

“[...] innovative IoT technology development that will add real value to NVE’s operational capability to monitor geo-hazards in remote and inaccessible areas.”.