What about weather? Adding the Meteorological Station to the Site

Today we added a meteorological station to our site. This station will collect data about the weather at our site at Lyon Arboretum every 30 minutes. The station is outfitted with sensors measuring precipitation, air temperature, humidity, light, soil temperature and soil moisture. By understanding what is currently happening in the at the site we can better understand how our research will apply.

Each month we will go out and collect the data from the data logger on the station which stores all the values recorded by each sensor every 30 minutes. From this we can analyze the data and make sure that the sensor is still in good working condition and is not producing values that are out of the normal range for that typical climate.

Figure 1: The top of the meteorological station at the research site, equipped with a precipitation gauge, temperature and humidity sensor and a photon (light) sensor.

Figure 2: The datalogger box that stores the data collected by the meteorological station.

Figure 3: Connecting the meteorological station to a laptop allows us to download the data for analysis.