Mountain Automatic Weather Station

My interest in mountains, snow and weather made me think on how to record weather data in a not man-made environment. I decided to put an automatic weather station on Monte Calvo, a mountain close to L’Aquila. I chosed this installation site because of the interesting metereological position and my love for that mountain.

For this installation I worked with MeteoAQuilano, a team of well prepared people that monitors the climate of L’Aquila and the surroundings with a huge number of weather stations and makes daily weather forecasts for these territories. We opted for a Davis Vantage Pro 2, a semi-professional weather station.

The station even presents three additional custom sensors: the Ultrasonic Ranging Module JSN-SR04T, the Infrared Thermometer MLX90614ESF-BCH-000-TU-ND and a Pyranometer.

Data are readed from the station console and the custom sensors by a Raspberry Pi 2B through Weewx, an open source software that also put them online by an Huawei internet key. Pictures of the weather conditions are taken by the Raspberry Camera Module V1 that mounts a wide-angle 160 degrees lens. All the electronics are located in a weatherproof box, and the system is powered by a solar panel, a battery and a charge controller.

The realtime data can be seen on MeteoAQuilano, Meteonetwork, LineaMeteo and Wunderground.

All the relevant codes are on my GitHub page. I’m not a programmer and my coding knowledge is limited. I’m sure that there are several smarter ways to write my codes and I’ll be happy to receive your suggestions to improve them.

This weather station is dedicated to Alessio Angelino Raparelli, died on Monte Calvo, and to all those who live the mountain with passion and dedication.