10. Automated Weather Monitoring Station Based on IoT for Smart Cities

In everyday life, weather conditions play a major role. Collection, monitoring, and analysis of data about the different parameters of the weather are necessary to plan various activities in day-to-day life. The weather conditions are required to be monitored for numerous reasons, like the dependency of agriculture, aerial, and marine transport services on the weather; detection of air quality and particulate matter for the health of humans and the environment; to ensure a safe working environment in industries; to predict and forecast climatic phenomena, etc. For ages due to the unavailability of accurate forecast data, due to irregular measurement and analysis of weather conditions, many natural calamities and disasters take place resulting in the loss of millions of lives. Data collected from satellites is for a larger geographical area and not for a pinpointed area at the ground level let us say for a city and therefore in some cases some mismatching of data may occur. If data from the ground level are provided as an added aid to the Meteorological department along with the data collected through various other means to perform analysis there are chances of better prediction and forecasting of natural phenomena. The dissertation is a solution to overcome these limitations.

In today’s world, some major areas of application of a smart, real-time, efficient, low-cost, accurate, low-power, portable, high-speed, Internet of Things (IoT)-based Weather Monitoring station are: Airport operations, Coastal area weather detection, Construction of high rising structures, Agricultural greenhouse, and warehouse condition monitoring, Air Pollution, Solar-based technological industries. Therefore, the need of the hour is to design an Automated Weather Monitoring System which will enable enhanced data collection in real-time for different parameters, such as light intensity, humidity, temperature, air quality, and wind speed without the intervention of humans. This Weather Monitoring Station circuit will be designed to provide an automatic monitoring mechanism to authorities and for the people who pass by the location at which the station is installed. For this purpose, competitive strategy tools and equipment are required to design hardware to fetch the required data and provide it for analysis.

This chapter describes the model designed for this automatic monitoring, and the main component used in this model is Raspberry Pi, which will control all the sensors and upload the real-time data collected using the sensors to a cloud and display the same on an LCD screen/panel installed onsite. The Weather Monitoring Station prototype uses a Light intensity sensor (LDR), Anemometer, Temperature sensor, and Air Quality detection sensor, the continuous analog readings of which will be converted to digital using an ADC IC MCP3208.