Boosting a Weather Monitoring System in Low Income Economies Using Open and Non-Conventional Systems: Data Quality...

In low-income and developing countries, inadequate weather monitoring systems adversely affect the capacity of managing natural resources and related risks. Low-cost and IoT devices combined with a large diffusion of mobile connection and open technologies offer a possible solution to this problem. This research quantitatively evaluates the data quality of a non-conventional, low-cost and fully open system. The proposed novel solution was tested for a duration of 8 months, and the collected observations were compared with a nearby authoritative weather station. The experimental weather station is based in Arduino and transmits data through the 2G General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) to the istSOS which is a software to set-up a web service to collect, share and manage observations from sensor networks using the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The results demonstrated that this accessible solution produces data of appropriate quality for natural resource and risk management.