Hydrometeorological Data Collection, Publication And Analysis Using Open-Source Hardware And Software

Abstract

Hydrometeorological data is exiguous in developing countries due to the exorbitant price of actual weather monitoring systems acquisition and communication infrastructure built mostly in developed countries. Another impediment to large scale data collection in developed countries is the lack or limited local resources to ensure the maintenance of stations equipments. However, recent advanced progresses made in information and communication technologies have paved the way to access to a large set of free software and low-cost and low-power hardware to sense and monitor the environment. Many researchers and practitioners have grasped the opportunities offered by those technological advances, but, have applied them in a restrained way. In this paper, we will attempt to make a much larger use of available and appropriate open-source hardware and software to allow for inexpensive collection, storage, publication and analysis of hydrometeorological data. Our envisioned system prototype will consist of a very few sensor nodes controlled by the Arduino micro-controller with a complete set of low-cost sensors attached to measure variables relevant to hydrological processes, a central node which gathers from each leaf nodes via Radio, data transmission over a GSM network through a Raspberry Pi from the central node. We will also explore the option to store the data into the MySQL version of the CUAHSI Observations Data Model (ODM) database using a Raspberry Pi to host the database. Access to CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) codes will hopefully facilitate the development of software to automatically load the data into the MySQL database and publish the data