Provision of Soil Moisture Sensors

Description

UCD – supported by a wide variety of researchers across Irish institutions and contributing to the AGMET group are installing equipment to monitor soil moisture status across Ireland. This is happening in close collaboration with the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), who operates the COSMOS-UK network of soil moisture monitoring field stations. A network of soil moisture probes and new instrumentation known as Cosmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing Systems (COSMOS) will be deployed across Ireland with co-located Automatic Weather Stations (operated by Met Eireann) to provide long-term measurements of soil moisture, a key variable in the control of land-surface-atmosphere interactions, and of essential climate variables such as rainfall, temperature, atmospheric pressure, and relative humidity. This will provide the infrastructure to enhance atmospheric sciences, agricultural decision support and ecosystem monitoring by making near real-time data freely available via the internet to underpin a wide range of science. Tenders are sought for the provision of both equipment and the technical services to build, install and maintain these first stations of a new COSMOS-IRL network. The primary requirement of this competition relates to the provision of sensors for six (6) soil moisture measurement stations comprising of a Cosmic Ray Neutron Sensor (CRNS) designed for soil moisture monitoring plus 21 soil moisture probes with associated equipment. The Tender shall include an option for up to four (4) additional soil moisture measurement stations (for a total of 10 stations). Half of the stations will be at new locations and half of the stations will be co-located with existing Automatic Weather Stations (i.e. 3 stations for the tender of 6 stations and 5 stations for the tender of 10 stations). The details of the station configuration are described in section 1.4 (Network configuration). The function of the station is to automatically acquire, process and store data. The station will have the capability to communicate