As you will soon learn, your intentions and your plans are not what does the work. They are good steps along the way, but it's the actual hardware and software installation that must perform.
Your original intention may be to start small. Along the way you may want to re-consider various assumptions and decisions. Changes in infrastructure, your knowledge, or advances in technology (or your budget) may make "the stuff of dreams" readily possible.
Bringing something new into existence requires a pioneer spirit. You will be doing something which, so far, no one else has either bothered with or has known how to do. This is an opportunity to catch people's imagination about what is possible. It can be an exciting adventure. It can also be a real pain. Like the pioneers, sometimes you run into unwelcome challenges.
From the perspective of one weather station's experience, here are a few issues you may want to consider:
Your potential customers include anyone who can access your information. For a display on the wall, it's anyone who might wander by. For a web page, it's potentially anyone, anywhere, who has internet access.
Example: The weather station on Hoodoo Butte was originally envisioned as an aid to ski area operations. Made available on the web, it has since been used by campers, climbers, fishermen, forest fire investigators, weather forecasters, geophysicists investigating magma movement, and parasailers for flying conditions. And maybe a few others who haven't dropped us a note.
You are not a slave to this extended audience, but realizing that they
exist is a start. It may help shape your plans for what you do.
Sometimes the customer doesn't realize what they need: Where one may
spend hours out on a cross-country trail, would it be handy to be reminded
when sunset happens?
Sometimes the customer has a different perspective: US-based sites may forget
that a lot of the world measures temperature, air pressure and wind speed in
metric units.
Knowing these needs, you can start assembling a list of the features for
your site. Some parameters you may measure and report. Others information
may be best handled with a reference to somewhere else. Web pages are built
around the idea that linking to someone else's information is almost as good
as having it yourself.
For a weather station, links to the local National Weather Service office are
an easy way to access forecast information. Local web cameras add
immeasureably to understanding what the weather is doing.
At some point you will realize that some features are impractical. For lack
of time, money, access, or technology, some of these features will have to
be moved to a "wish list".
Before you close-out your imagination, consider whether a "weather station"
might be too limited. Consider if a "measurement station" may be what you
really wanted. Weather variables might be a start, but what else might
be of interest?
Rime icing is affected by temperature, humidity and wind speed. Where it
forms depends on the wind direction. If you are interested in the
"rime icing hazard", there are four basic parameters which need to be
measured. Additional analysis will be necessary in order to state the
magnitude of the hazard.
Some measurements may require interpretation before yielding what you want.
If you measure overall snow depth, but want to report "new snowfall" amounts,
you will need to keep some history of your snow depth readings.
Reporting river flow rates, given a water depth gauge, would need an equation
or look-up table.
Commonly-measured Parameters:
Those "non-weather" measurements could be a real challenge, but for now
we're just trying to identify what might be interesting to measure.
Before you place a sensor, consider the location:
Consider sensing technologies which will survive the likely abuses.
You may want to create different products (i.e. web pages) for
different customers.
The design stage is when the strengths (and weaknesses) of a
station are determined. Perhaps unwittingly.
The potential to gracefully accept some upgrades might be nice.
Leaving enough room in a box, extra conductors in a cable or power
supply capacity might make the difference between a simple addition
or a significant extra project in the future.
Design is normally followed by ordering the hardware. Get this
backwards, and you may be saddled with hardware which has no hope
of surviving the environment. Go ahead and use what you're given,
but have the understanding that it may have to be replaced if it
cannot handle the severe service it may be exposed to.
What do they want (or need) to know?
Different types of customers will have different interests and needs.
Understanding these needs, if even in a superficial way, may help you
better understand what features a well-rounded weather station might
include. This part of the process is meant to uncover new ideas.
What do you need to measure?
Having determined the information of interest, what needs
to be measured? What we are interested-in is normally directly
measureable, but not always:
Where will you measure it?
For every sensor, the measurement site (top of mountain, base area, ...) needs to
be selected, followed by the specifics of how the sensor will be mounted.
With a general location in mind, how will the sensor be mounted?
- Wind direction downwind of a building.
- Snow depth affected by tree wells.
- e.g. 25' cable from the snow depth sounder to its power regulator &
serial data interface.
How will you measure it?
The conditions experienced at a site will affect what sort of instruments will
function or survive. The top of a mountain is subject to high winds and rime
ice; it is no place for a light-duty plastic wind vane.
Creek beds may be scoured by flood waters and debris; not a good place for a
free-standing measuring stick.
How will you move the information?
How will you get the sensor information to some central location
so that it may be stored or summarized for use?
- Dedicated lines installed just for this purpose
- Spare wire pairs found in existing phone or lift control cables
How will you display the information?
Just because you measure or generate information does not require you
to report it. A back-up air temperature measurement might be useful
if the primary instrument goes bad, but until then redundant information
just clutters the report. A "local" weather page used inside a ski
area might include an analysis for rime icing or avalanche hazard.
That's handy for the lift operators and public safety folks, but is
probably not of interest to the general public.
- Hung on the wall in an office?
- In a lobby?
- Makes the information accessible world-wide.
- Attached to a low power radio transmitter ->
Drive within range of the transmitter and tune-in.
- Attached to phone system -> Dial-a-report
What powers it?
At every location you have a powered device, consider:
- Power plug?
- Battery? Solar? Wind power?
- 120 VAC? 24 VAC?
- 12 VDC?
- Feed line cut by falling trees, forest fire.
- Rime ice, snow or clouds between sun & solar panels
- UPS? (Uninterruptible Power Supply)
- Battery? Trickle charger?
- Solar panels?
- Does this point automatically come back to life?
- Is the back-up power source automatically restored?
Who is going to design the station?
Assuming you don't order a complete "station in a box", who
is responsible for determining how it all fits together?
- If the wind sensor puts out a twelve volt pulse, but the
datalogger can only handle a 5 volt signal, how do you make
them compatible?
- What software is going to talk to the RS-232 serial port
on the snow depth sensor?
- Since RS-232 is only good for maybe a hundred feet, how
will you communicate with the snow depth sensor (or datalogger)
if they are located thousands of feet away?
- What happens if lightning strikes a part of the system?
Who is going to install the station?
The technical knowledge needed to install a station is comparable
to the design effort. Issues not anticipated in the design may arise
in the field, requiring on-site re-design (or re-writing of software).