Councils lose gauges where the network stops. IoT builds the device, connects it over terrestrial, LEO satellite or GEO satellite from one SIM, and feeds it straight into the disaster management dashboard your coordinators already use.
The Bureau of Meteorology built Enviromon in 1996 and gave it to councils free for nearly thirty years. On 30 June 2026 the Bureau ended external support, stating it no longer meets basic cybersecurity, stability and resilience standards. It was not switched off. Nobody maintains it.
In October 2026, AusAlert goes live — the national cell-broadcast warning system replacing SMS-based Emergency Alert. It delivers the message. Someone still has to decide to send it.
So a council is running unsupported 1996 software at one end of its flood warning chain and a brand-new national system at the other. In Queensland, flood warning is a local government responsibility — which puts that gap on the smallest and least resourced level of government in the most disaster-prone state in the country.
IoT sits in the middle: the evidence a person needs before they decide to warn anyone.
A monitored floodway, river gauge, water quality point or environmental site — delivered as a managed service and fed straight into the disaster management dashboard your coordinators already use. No new console to learn during an event.
Ultrasonic level sensing with optional rain gauge, or an environmental sensor suite on the same node. Solar power, enclosure, antenna, calibration and field commissioning. Built for Australian conditions and mounted on the structure you already have.
One SIM roaming terrestrial and non-terrestrial on 3GPP. Where a carrier is reachable the device uses it; where none exists it reports over LEO or GEO satellite. Managed SIM policy, device health and data quality included.
Readings, rate of rise, flood class and gauge health delivered into the council's existing disaster management dashboard, or into a ThingsBoard instance the council owns. Every reading also written to a plain local database that stays with the council.
A floodway does not move to suit the network. The connectivity has to come to it, and no single bearer reaches everywhere in Australia — let alone everywhere a catchment needs watching. So the node carries three paths, with edge buffering and local decision logic underneath.
A 3GPP roaming profile that registers on terrestrial carrier networks and on satellite NTN from the same SIM. No second module, no second subscription, no manual switch. Where terrestrial exists the device uses it; where it does not, the same SIM registers on satellite.
NTN roaming is carried under one agreement rather than per constellation, so the device is not tied to a single satellite operator. That keeps the architecture open as LEO and GEO footprints change.
Environmental telemetry is small and infrequent. Connectivity is billed on what is actually sent, which is what makes a heartbeat from a floodway economic at all.
Buffering, watchdogs and local thresholds on the node, so a device keeps measuring and keeps its data through a link outage and reports the gap when it returns.
A council gauge is worth more when it is read against the catchment around it. The platform federates 81 authoritative networks across 14 countries — national hydrological services, ocean and carbon observatories, satellite products, official statistics and WMO exchange standards — each carrying its own authority, licence, latency and permitted use. The same architecture serves any catchment on Earth; today it serves Queensland.
A source is promoted only when its stations have been enumerated, units and datum mapped, licence accepted and a live endpoint tested. Nothing is marked live because its documentation exists.
| Integration status | Sources | Meaning |
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FloodCheck Queensland, managed by the Department of Natural Resources, holds floodplain overlays, modelled flood extents and historical floodlines from 1893, 1974, 2010 and 2011. It is the best public record of where water has gone before. It is also, by its own terms, not for use during an event.
A flood study is a map of what happened. A gauge is a measurement of what is happening. Most Queensland catchments have the first and not enough of the second — and the councils with the largest floodplains are frequently the ones with the fewest instruments, because that is where the network stops.
Read a live gauge against a historical inundation extent and a disaster coordinator has something neither gives alone: the river is at 4.6 m and rising at 0.34 m/h, and here is what went under at that height in 2011. That is the pairing we build toward — the study as context, the gauge as evidence, and the age of every reading shown alongside it.
IoTportal, our open ingestion and federation platform, is built on ThingsBoard Community Edition and released under Apache 2.0. A council should not have to buy the ability to read data from gauges it already owns, and it should not be possible to lock one out of its own records. What legitimately costs money is somebody being accountable at 2am in February when the river is rising and a gauge goes quiet.
Decoders, provider adapters, the federation layer and the dashboard are open source. A council, a consultancy or a competing supplier can pick it up and run it without a licensing conversation. Wider adoption of a common open ingestion layer is worth more to everybody than controlling the derivatives.
No per-seat platform fee, no annual software licence, no renewal cliff. Every reading is also written to a plain local database the council keeps — readable by anything, exportable in open formats, and entirely theirs if the arrangement ends.
ALERT and ALERT2 are open, royalty-free protocols governed by the National Hydrologic Warning Council. OGC SensorThings, OGC API Features and WMO WIS2 are published standards. We implement the standard once, then a new network is a configuration entry rather than new code.
The most valuable contribution is not code — it is ten minutes of recorded output from a real base station, with the operator's permission. Receiver framing varies by manufacturer and configuration, and every validated capture makes the decoder safer for the next council.
Tell us where the gauge needs to go and what your disaster management team already runs. We will tell you what it costs, what it can and cannot do, and what has to be commissioned on site before anyone relies on it.
IoT provides monitoring, federation and decision support. It does not forecast and it does not issue warnings. Government and authorised agencies retain statutory warning responsibility in every jurisdiction shown here.