On behalf of the research team, I am very pleased to announce that our preprint of a research paper on the use of low-cost automatic weather stations, LoRaWAN technology and various IoT sensors has been published. “From Mountains to Data: Low-Cost Weather Stations in Challenging Conditions in Kyrgyzstan” describes the selection criteria for the equipment to be deployed and provides detailed information on the installation process at the pilot sites, as well as the challenges encountered during the project.
For me, one of the main conclusions of this research project is that there has been a significant breakthrough in the quality and availability of telemetry sensors over the past five years.
Our data analysis shows that two-tier automatic weather stations demonstrate similar results (daily, decadal, monthly averages) with a high degree of accuracy (95-98%) as the first-tier AWS. The only difference is that new technologies have reduced the cost of weather stations by 10-20 times. Instead of $50,000 worth of equipment, you can use $1,000-$5,000 weather stations and get identical results (subject to regular calibration and maintenance of the equipment).
The second important takeaway is the demonstration of the potential of LoRaWAN data transmission technology for rapid deployment and monitoring of climate change, creation of geoinformation models, forecasting future trends, and taking mitigating preventive measures.
The third important takeaway is the practical application of such an approach to data transmission as Delay-Tolerant Networks. With this approach, under adverse external conditions, data can be collected and transmitted later. In the conditions of the pilot project in Kyrgyzstan, DTN showed good performance in severe frost conditions in December 2023, when the temperature dropped to -23-28 degrees. As a result, some nearby cell towers were disconnected for a while, as were some of our sensors. However, data recording continued, and when the network was restored, the data was successfully transmitted to the central server.
The full version of this article will be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Sensors. This scientific work became possible during the implementation of the research project of the Internet Society Kyrgyz Chapter with the financial support of the Internet Society Foundation.
