Development of Cloud-Based Weather Monitoring System Using Distributed Weather Stations

Advancement in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the development of distributed weather monitoring systems to target a specific area for accurate weather information, these systems use weather stations readily available in the market for weather sensing. However, most of these weather monitoring systems are limited by the specific weather station brand and this prevents users from achieving their target performance and functionalities. To address problems concerning limited system flexibility, scalability, and weather data accessibility, the development of a truly distributed weather monitoring system was implemented. We developed a flexible gateway containing software-defined radio receivers to receive radio transmissions integrated into a computer running opensource drivers and customized programs to emulate receiver functionalities. We tested three different setups: (1) a radio catering to one weather station of a specific model one at a time, (2) a radio catering to multiple weather stations from different models concurrently, and (3) a radio receiving data from our custom-made weather station transmitting over LoRA. We developed a time multiplexing mechanism to process multiple weather stations despite the operational constraints of our target weather stations. The gateway was able to receive weather data from multiple weather stations and upload the data to a secure database within 5–10 minute intervals. Through this implementation, new and existing weather systems can be modified to suit user preferences, and have better resource optimization and scalability while only using SDRs as their designated transmission receiver.