A low-cost development of automatic weather station based on Arduino for monitoring precipitable water vapor

Abstract

Water vapor is the engine of the weather system. Continuous monitoring of its variability on spatial and temporal scales is essential to help improve weather forecasts. This research aims to develop an automatic weather station at low cost using an Arduino microcontroller to monitor precipitable water vapor (PWV) on a micro-scale. The surface meteorological data measured from the BME280 sensor is used to determine the PWV. Our low-cost systems also consisted of a DS3231 real-time clock (RTC) module, a 16×2 liquid crystal display (LCD) module with an I²C, and a micro-secure digital (micro-SD) card. The core of the system employed the Arduino Uno surface mount device (SMD) R3 board. The measurement results for long-term monitoring at the tested sites (ITNY and GUWO) found that the daily mean error of temperature and humidity values were 1.30% and 3.16%, respectively. While the error of air pressure and PWV were 0.092% and 2.61%, respectively. The PWV value is higher when the sun is very active or during a thunderstorm. The developed weather system is also capable of measuring altitude on pressure measurements and automatically stores daily data. With a total cost below 50 dollars, all major and support systems developed are fully functional and stable for long-term measurements.