Sonde Instrumentation for Upper Air Weather Monitoring System
Raymart B. Balakit, Febus Reidj G. Cruz, May Anne C. Valencia · 2019
Today, weather balloons are one of the emerging technologies used to monitor the weather. Even so, problems related to the cost of implementation, tracking of the device and weight of payload have limited innovators to cover a larger area to monitor atmospheric data. With this in mind, the present work has designed a sonde instrument using temperature sensor, humidity sensor, barometric pressure sensor, GPS and microcontroller. Actual balloon flights were conducted to gather upper-air measurements and laboratory experiments were carried out to determine the overall performance of the proposed device compared to the existing devices. The measurements taken were sent to a ground station using a radio frequency transceiver module and were saved in a database file. Results were tabulated and interpreted using statistical analysis. Laboratory tests showed that there was a high correlation between the measurements made by the proposed device and the existing devices. Field experiment was carried out using a 150 g hydrogen-filled balloon to lift the proposed device into the atmosphere. Z-scores for the two experiments done showed that there was no significant difference in the mean of the observations done by the two devices.