Our Experience with Low Cost Meteorological Networks for Citizen Scientists, Schools, and Others

The citizen scientist community is growing rapidly across the globe and includes several highly successful models such as CoCoRaHS and Citizen Weather Observation Program. Citizen science climate networks have proven themselves over time to greatly enhance our understanding of weather and climate to include documenting extreme events, and there exists even more opportunities for the citizen science community to contribute to climate science by collecting climate data using automated weather observations. While a citizen science network fulfills a need and provides an important service, the climate community desires the continued operation of the back-bone climate monitoring programs such as the NWS Cooperative Observer Program and the US Climate Reference Network. However, in the current funding environment, these back-bone networks are facing dwindling budgets that threaten to shut down the programs. It is in this environment that citizen science observations will become even more important.

Fortunately, developments in the open software and hardware communities have made it easier for citizen scientists and others to participate and send their data to common data repositories. Hardware projects, such as the Raspberry Pi and Arduino paired with open software, make it easier to design home-brew monitoring systems. A network operator could easily setup an inexpensive Raspberry Pi with a Davis Vantage Pro2 Weather Station to fulfill the basic needs of meteorological monitoring for an area. An Arduino hardware board could be paired with simple thermocouples to provide air and soil temperatures. Using the CoCoRaHS model, simple sensors could be designed so volunteers in the community could read data from the sensor directly and report the data to a web site. By partnering with the community, the operator could also use personal WI-FI access to receive the telemetered data from these simple home-brew stations. Of course, a trade-off exists where some accuracy is sacrificed to ensure consistent data collection and budgetary savings. This paper will describe our experiences in the design and implementation of a meteorological network that ensures a reliable and sustainable data collection scheme.