Nick Wallace
How can we improve the safety of outdoor activities in remote areas? If outdoorspeople had access to accurate, hyper-local weather data, they could make more informed decisions about weather risks and their safety. Existing satellite-based weather forecasts do not take into account the variety of micro-climates that exist in expansive remote areas.
Description
For people who live or spend time in extremely remote areas, unreliable weather data is a major safety concern which can lead to unnecessary risk and misinformed decision-making. Climb.It Weather System (CWS) is a proof of concept aimed at solving this problem.
CWS is a system of transmitters and receivers collecting on-the-ground data from remote areas and publishing it online via radio transmission. These transmitters live in the field, running on a combination of solar panel and battery power, in order to broadcast sensor data over high frequency packet radio (APRS). CWS receivers live areas with WiFi or 3G infrastructure, receive sensor data directly from a transmitter (or APRS repeater), and publish this data to a database server.
Outside the scope of this proof of concept, this project will expand to include a system for serving this data, as well as forecasts based on this data, to the public.
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Thesis