1. Designing and Building an Inexpensive, Long-Range, Energy-Efficient Weather Station to Improve Local Weather Models
Johnnie Johnson, Abhishek Viswanathan
CS Advanced Topics on Internet of Things - Dr. Daniel Mosse
School of Computing & Information
University of Pittsburgh

2. Motivation & Background
Existing weather stations are either too expensive, limited in range, or require a lot of power.
Localised weather data and predictions are hard to come by when existing weather models rely on a few areas that are sampled and then extrapolated to a larger radius.
Weather Underground allows and encourages users who own weather stations to upload the data from their weather stations to the WU cloud, and uses a proprietary mathematical model that allows for more fine-tuned local weather prediction.
It currently receives data from more than 250,000 personal weather stations, but it is our assumption that this number does not reflect all the people that would like to own a weather station.
If users could build their own weather station inexpensively, while also not having to worry about regular maintenance or battery changes, this number could be significantly higher, while also providing greater local weather prediction accuracy.
Local weather prediction E

3. Weather Station Challenges
Maintain sensor accuracy in a waterproof environment
Range limitations using WiFi or Bluetooth for transmission
Expensive
Balancing energy usage
Data processing

4. Related Work

5. Additional Features Aluminum shielding Longer range Basic security
Uploading to Weather Underground for citizen science
Clearer documentation

6. Implementation

7. Personal Weather Station Properties

8. Future Work - Possible Improvements
Defending against replay attacks
Better encryption
Improve sensor accuracy
Rain Gauge, Wind speed, Snow Intensity sensing
Longer Battery Life
Specialized power-saving modes for best utilization of solar/wind and optimal battery charging
Bare-bones Arduino board

9. Thank you!