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Date March 10, 2026
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New sensor network makes real-time flooding, air-quality data available to Rhode Island communities

Data from flood sensors that track coastal and roadway flooding, along with air-quality readings and weather information, are freely available to the public through a new dashboard.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A team of Brown University researchers has launched a new network of environmental sensors that monitor flood conditions, air quality and weather data across Rhode Island. The data, collected from nearly 100 sensors statewide, are available to anyone through an online dashboard.

The dual goals of the project, called the Network for Environmental Sensing and Technology (NEST), are to give municipal emergency managers and the general public access to real-time information from their local communities, while providing researchers with data that can be used to make better predictions about future emergency events. NEST was developed in conjunction with Community-driven Coastal Climate Research and Solutions (3CRS), a project funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at addressing climate change related challenges faced by low-lying communities in New England.

“Municipalities across Rhode Island are dealing with the effects of climate change, and many are developing their own climate resilience plans,” said 3CRS principal investigator Emanuele Di Lorenzo, a professor in Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and an affiliate of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. “The work we do with 3CRS is to help communities build climate resilience, and NEST is a part of that. We want to provide people with data they need to aid in planning and decision-making around climate-related events.”

The NEST team has been working with officials in Providence and coastal communities like Barrington, Bristol and Narragansett to place flood sensors in key locations within those communities. Sensors include marine tidal gauges, stream and river gauges, and over-land sensors on low-lying streets. On the NEST dashboard, users can view current and historic data for all of those sensors and sign up to have email alerts sent to them when a particular sensor reaches flood level.

In addition to sensors installed by the NEST team, the dashboard includes publicly available water level data from sensors operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as well as temperature and wind data from NOAA and National Weather Service weather stations. The dashboard also includes data from air quality sensors installed by Breathe Providence, a community-focused air monitoring network launched by Brown researchers and students in 2022. 

Sol Cooperdock, a research associate at Brown who oversees the NEST project, says he sees several ways in which the dashboard could be of immediate use to people and communities across Rhode Island. For example, the data could provide communities with the documentation they need to take action toward addressing problems in their communities.

“There are times — like when individuals or communities are applying for grants — that people need data to prove that their lived experience is real,” Cooperdock said. “A community may know very well that there’s regular flooding in a certain area, but they might not have the hard data to back it up. We can provide those data.”

NEST could also help emergency managers monitor conditions in real time as events unfold, helping them to make decisions about when to close roads, for example.

“Emergency managers often have to go out with measuring sticks during flooding events to measure water levels,” Cooperdock said. “But if they’re able to check the dashboard, that could save them a lot of time. It also gives them continuous data instead of just snapshots from when they were able to get out there.”

Meredith Hastings, chair of Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and project lead for Breathe Providence, said she hopes inclusion of air quality sensors on the dashboard will raise awareness of air-quality issues, particularly among vulnerable populations.

“The idea behind Breathe Providence is to have air quality data available in neighborhoods across Providence, particularly in areas of the city where residents experience some of the highest asthma rates,” Hastings said. “Including the data on the NEST dashboard is another way to let people know these data are around and are something they can use.”

Over the longer term, the NEST team is hopeful that the network can provide data that could improve forecast models and enable better, more detailed predictions of extreme events like flooding or wind damage.

“We’d like to develop forecast models that are more spatially explicit, but the challenge has been a lack of validation data,” Di Lorenzo said. “The NEST data could help us to build the baseline datasets to validate those models.”

For now, however, the researchers say their focus is on providing data directly to communities who need it most.

“The whole purpose of this is that it's for the public,” Cooperdock said. “I'm a scientific researcher, but over the last several years I've been focused more on providing data that people can use and that are relevant to their local communities.”

Cooperdock says he’s interested in hearing from municipal officials or members of the public about where additional sensors might be useful. Contact information for the NEST team is available on the project website. 

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IBES Research

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