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 Capitol Greenroofs

Capitol Greenroofs are our partner in this project. They are a company who specialize in Green Roof installations in and around our nation's capitol.

With over 15% of the District of Columbia covered by buildings and another 14 million sq. ft. of additional impervious development proposed in the next 20 years, there is an enormous demand for vegetated roofing systems to help mitigate urban growth pressures. 

This increased development is expected to increase stormwater runoff by 34% and will likely increase the City's mean annual temperature by 2 degrees.

Sensor Network Description: We intend to install a Carnegie Mellon wireless sensor network in a green roof installation in early 2010.

This wireless sensor system will be connected to an irrigation solenoids that will irrigate based upon set points that we will derive from preliminary calibration research (see below).

We will be able to remotely monitor this system through the internet, and change these set points, if necessary.

Green Roof Objectives: We intend to monitor the water content of the green roof to achieve two main purposes. Firstly, we will quantify the amount of water retained by the green roof at any one time, to provide stormwater retention estimates on an area basis.

Secondly, we will monitor and control the irrigation system to ensure plant survival through drought periods and quantify the reduction in time for complete vegetative cover.

Sensor Project Objectives: Our primary challenges with this sensor network is to ensure that sensors perform as intended in these extremely porous shale-based substrates.

Sensors will be calibrated in this specific substrate prior to installation, to ensure the accuracy of this data.

In addition to the moisture sensors, we will collect additional environmental data (rainfall, light, soil and air temperature, relative humidity) which will allow us to model the growth rate data of various sedum species for comparison to other green roof installations in other part of the United States and the world.