Snow observatories

During my PhD studies in Information and Communication Technologies at the University of Roma Sapienza I continued working at my automatic weather-snow (AWSS) station project which I started in the far 2016 and which is described here.

The AWSS is powered with solar panels and an accumulation battery which guarantee several days of functioning without solar energy. It consists in several atmospheric and snow sensors which are connected to a Raspberry Pi, which hosts a client that reads the data measured at a custom interval and sends them to a private server through GSM connection. If a network failure occurs form the client or server side and the data are not present in the server database, the client send back to the server all the missing past data as soon as the internet connection is restored and the remote server become again available.

There are actually two versions of the AWSS working with slightly different configurations: in one case atmospheric and snow measurements are directly read by the Raspberry Pi from the custom made sensors through the client, in the second case instead the atmospheric data are measured with Davis Vantage Pro 2 senors, and read from the station console.

The AWSS with the first configuration is located in the Campo Felice ski resort, in the locality of Colle del Nibbio, at 1790 m a.s.l.. Instead the AWSS with the second configuration is installed on the Campo Imperatore plateau, in the locality of Pietrattina, at 1459 m a.s.l., and it is equipped also with a Raspberry Camera Module V1 in order to take pictures of the weather conditions.

The AWSS have been financed by the CETEMPS research center and the no-profit association Meteoaquilano.

The data measured by the two weather stations can be seen on Meteoaquilano realtime data page.