Weather Station

Project Description

We have been tasked with assembling a weather station for the Renewable Energy Lab (RE Lab) at Northern Arizona University (NAU). This station is required to provide current, accurate weather data readings for academic and scientific use. While the RE Lab used to have functioning weather data collectors, they no longer function. Additionally, the previous collection required the professor to go into the RE lab itself and read the current data. There was no way to access this data remotely, nor was there a way to access previous data. Our aim is to fix this problem. Our project will collect data to display and store online for multiple years. This will allow us to alleviate the headache of collecting weather data from the RE Lab. While our weather station will not provide a forecast for upcoming weather events, the data collected will be sufficient to make such determinations. Weather stations are important installations, typically for the purpose of predicting future weather events, disaster preparedness, and agricultural information. Our weather station will collect data on temperature, rainfall, humidity, air pressure, solar radiation, and wind speed. The classes that our project should be the most influential for are the Renewable Energy course at NAU and the Wind Power course. The students and faculty will be able to access our data to perform calculations and other deliberations.

Our budget for this project includes around $3100 of preexisting equipment, an additional $500 dollars from our client for potential additional costs, and an expected $300 in fundraising from the team. The team has so far spent $36.36 on materials to create the prototypes. This $36.36 comes from the contributed total of $300 that the team provided following our unsuccessful fundraising attempts. Each team member has contributed $75 from their own personal savings.