Real-time weather data for UTM campus
August 20, 2010
I’ve been a busy boy this past month. Not did I help setup a turf-grass experiment site on campus with two portable weather towers, I have nearly completed the 10m permanent weather station tower on campus and setup a live weather-data server.
Here’s what’s going on behind the scenes. The station is connected to the internet via cellular communications. On a secure location on campus, we have a Mac Xserve server. On the Xserve, we have VMWare Fusion running Windows 7. That Windows virtual box remotely downloads the station data every 5 minutes and stores it on a shared drive between the Windows and Mac side. It also FTPs the data to a remote server for backup. On the Mac, a CRON job runs every 5 minutes to execute a MATLAB script which reads the data, saves it into daily files (for the current day and any missing days), plots graphs (lots of them) and much more. All the graphs and data are archived and will be available soon.
So, while it’s still a bit ugly, my first goal was to get it working — the technical aspects. Ta da! It works! And it updates every 5 minutes. Now we can work on making it pretty.
Oh, and we still have 10 more instruments to install on the station — including a full radiation suite, soil moisture at 3 depths, soil temperature, precipitation, and an aspirated temperature probe.
