Enhancement of North Carolina Agricultural Automated Weather Network and Development of Advanced Communication, Data Acquisition, and Dissemination Systems
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2000-06-06
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AgNET is a weather network, which collects surface and subsurface meteorological data in North Carolina. Each AgNet weather station measures a variety of weather parameters such as air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, solar radiation, photosynthetically active radiation, soil temperature, soil moisture and precipitation. The station summarizes the above parameters for every hour and stores them in its local memory. Currently the data collected over the entire day are then transferred to a central server through phone lines. The data collected at the central server are published on the Internet and disseminated by other means as well. The purpose of this thesis is to describe the modernization of the AgNet weather network by making the network conform to standards, implement a uniform sensor configuration and improve the methods of data acquisition, dissemination and display of weather data.Since phone-based communication is not economical for real time data transfers other techniques such as Radio Frequency (RF) communication and satellite based communication were evaluated. RF communication was the most promising communication technique. Since RF is limited by distance, a combination of RF and Internet was designed. In this type of communication, data are transmitted from the weather station and received by a base station that is on the Internet. The received data are then forwarded to a central server at the State Climate Office where they are archived and disseminated. A successful test was conducted as proof of concept between Lake Wheeler road Field laboratory site, Raleigh and Varsity Laboratory, NC State University.Since every system has inherent noise, data collected at each station have to go through different quality control algorithms to insure data quality. Different Quality Control (QC) algorithms were implemented which are discussed in the thesis.
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MS
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Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
