Low Cost Weather Station for Climate-Smart Agriculture

Abstract

Climate–smart agriculture is one of the techniques that maximizes agricultural outputs through proper management of inputs based on climatological conditions. Real-time weather monitoring system is an important tool to monitor the climatic conditions of a farm because many of the farms related problems can be solved by better understanding of the surrounding weather conditions. There are various designs of weather monitoring stations based on different technological modules. However, different monitoring technologies provide different data sets, thus creating vagueness in accuracy of the weather parameters measured. In this paper, a weather station was designed and deployed in an Edamame farm, and its meteorological data are compared with the commercial Davis Vantage Pro2 installed at the same farm.

Existing System

Web-based weather station for irrigation scheduling.

Proposed System

The low-cost reliable microclimate weather station called Cloud-based station was successfully designed, fabricated and installed in an Edamame farm. Upon comparing the data sets statistically, the results have shown that the Cloud-based station is equivalently efficient to measure air temperature, relative humidity and wind direction. Both commercial and lab-made stations yield similar characteristics of climatic conditions at the farm. Therefore, the cloud-based station is more preferable to use in terms of cost affordable to farmers. The Edamame farm is generally dominated by wind from the north and south due to presence of the mountain near the farm. The climatic conditions of the farm as indicated by the obtained data states that the rainy season is the best time to grow soybean. It is obvious that the stability of temperature and humidity would preserve the soil temperature and moisture at a constant level. Hence it is easy for farmers to manage the water supply to the crop like Edamame. The proper management of water supply to the crop will maximize the soybean yield potential. This is because there is boundary function relationship between soybean yield and the seasonal water supply, besides sowing data.

Architecture

Hardware diagram for base station

Hardware diagram for weather station