An ad-hoc RFID tag for glaciers monitoring

Since glaciers are an important indicator of climate changes, the studies related to glaciers environment and their physical properties have remarkably raised. In the framework of the project MALATRA, Fondazione Montagna sicura together with Envisens Technologies s.r.l., has developed an ad-hoc system able to monitor several physical properties of glaciers (e. g. their temperature and displacement during a specific time interval). The system is made up of a set of RFID “tags” placed inside the ice to perform the measurements and a handheld “reader” to collect data. Tags are equipped with several sensors and a memory in order to save data. Following an inquiring operation made by an operator, measurements are then transmitted to the reader, exploiting a dedicated radio communication link operating at 315 MHz. In order to recover the position of each tag after a certain period of time and to reconstruct the movements of the glacier, a localization scheme based on RSSI was developed. There is no limit to the number of tags that could be installed, thus allowing to measure with very high spatial resolution.