Weather Station Up and Running
By Gary Greenwood:
I finally have our custom weather station working on our dock on Antipoison Creek on the Northern Neck. This is a key part of our water-monitoring project. The weather station collects normal weather info, as well as water depth and water temperature. The next step is to add data collection for a variety of water quality metrics, including dissolved oxygen, salinity and PH. By collecting all these values over a period of time, we will be able to look for correlations between the weather and water quality.
This weather station is totally custom, using quality off-the-shelf sensors integrated with custom software running on an Arduino. In addition to storing the data within our internal database, the information is also available on weather underground at KVAWHITE14.
I used a variety of components to build this station:
- Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller
- Xbee radio to send the info from the dock to a computer in the house
- 30-amp solar panel, since there is no continuous AC power on the dock.
- Genasun charge controller and Panasonic 7.2AH battery to manage and store the solar for nights and shady days.
- Inspeed Vortex II anemometer.
- Inspeed E-vane
- Rotronic HC2-S3 temperature and humidity sensor from Campbell Scientific with 10-layer radiation shield
- Bosch BMP180 Barometric Pressure sensor from Adafruit
- Keller Acculevel water level transmitter, including water temperature
- Apogee SP-212 pyranometer
- Adafruit DS18B20 temperature (backup for the Rotronic)
- It’s all mounted on a two-part fiberglass mast from DXEngineering. The mast is screwed to the dock and one of the pilings.
See picture of the weather station below:
Chesapeake Bay environment and water quality blog 