DEVELOPMENT OF A HIGH ALTITUDE ATMOSPHERIC DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM FOR WEATHER BALLOON DEPLOYMENT

Abstract

Atmospheric data is highly essential for diverse applications in agriculture, meteorology, space research, wireless communication, and other fields. This data is monitored and logged by centralized organisations and centres, usually with restricted access to the end-users. This research therefore develops an electronic data acquisition system for the monitoring and profiling of atmospheric/weather parameters using wireless sensor network (WSN) approach. The developed system is an 800mW battery-powered mini-weather station capable of transmitting data within a differential altitude of 1.6km. It monitors three (3) important atmospheric parameters (relative humidity, temperature and pressure) using BMP180 sensor for temperature and pressure and HIH-4030 sensor for relative humidity. It also has a GPS Click L10 module incorporated to send streams of GPS data (Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, Date and Time) for tracking purposes. The data are transmitted remotely through a DRF1605H transceiver to a ground receiving station designed for the purpose using a 2.4GHz Low Rate-Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN) Zigbee protocol. With the developed system, atmospheric profiling of Idanre Hill (Latitude 7.302832oN and Longitude 5.135373oE), Idanre, Ondo State, Nigeria, was carried out. For the 137.5m differential altitude covered, the field tests show a fairly constant relative humidity of 97%, a linearly-decreasing temperature from 28.04oC to 24.97oC and an exponentially-decreasing pressure from 979.26 mbar to 963.59 mbar with increasing altitude from 327.0m to 464.5m above sea level. The trends of these field test data are consistent with models available in literature and the system, if deployed via a weather balloon, is to serve as a mini-weather station for real-time data acquisition