Observing the Real-time Local Weather: Why You Should Have a Home Weather Station

Weather reports play an important role in people’s daily life and production activities. People tend to refer to local weather when planning outings, and farmers and planters arrange factors of production according to local weather conditions.

However, it is normally the case that the weather reports are sourced from stations miles away from your location. This results in significant discrepancies between the actual conditions around you and the reports. Hence, it is worth considering deploying a local/home weather station that tells you the real-time weather data for decision-making.

What Can Home Weather Station Do?

By measuring atmospheric conditions, typically temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, wind speed, and wind direction, a home weather station will provide you with exact weather conditions at your place of residence, farm, school, or commercial place over time. It usually comes in the form of a wireless weather station, which is a set of instruments and sensors that can be connected to the Internet through wireless connections, making it possible to monitor your weather conditions from anywhere and share your findings with others.

Normally, the home weather station can be utilized in the following scenarios.

Personal weather base. With a home weather station deployed in the backyard, garden, or indoors, one can easily measure the air temperature and humidity, rainfall, UV index, etc. for improving the environment at the place of residence.

Precision agriculture. Home weather station enables farmers to obtain climate data and information in time, bring scientific management measures into production, and therefore improve agricultural production capacity and level. This is exactly the importance of utilizing weather stations in agriculture.

Meteorology projects. The home weather stations can support applications in the meteorological field, for example, timely reflect the changes of various abnormal meteorological conditions in the field of traffic and transportation to provide real-time scientific basis data for traffic management departments.

Urban weather monitoring. The home weather stations provide real-time data for infrastructure maintenance in urban squares, parks, scenic spots, golf courses, and other commercial places.

Important Factors to Consider When Choosing a Home Weather Station

Someone may ask: what would be the best home weather station in the market? The true answer is that there is probably no “best home weather station“, there is only the” most suitable home weather station” based on personal demands and conditions. Let’s take a look at the several factors and features needed to be considered when choosing a suitable home weather station.

Sensor Requirements
At a minimum, a qualified home weather station should provide the following environmental factors:

• Wind Speed and Direction
• Rainfall Measurements
• Barometric Pressure
• Indoor and Outdoor Temperature and Humidity

These are the basics that any weather station should have. From here, other features depend on your preferences.

Accuracy and Updating Frequency
Accuracy is the fundamental property of a weather station. It is usually presented as a margin of error when probing a certain factor. If the margin of error is small, the accuracy is considered to be high.

Accuracy depends on the capability of the sensor, and this results in the differentiation of weather stations with different levels. Technically, better home weather stations collect and update observations at a higher frequency. High-end weather stations will report the observations as quickly as every 2.5 – 5 seconds, while some lower-end products would only report every 30 seconds or more.

Transmission Distance
The station ought to be deployed within a certain area to ensure valid communication with the console. Most home weather stations have a transmission range of 330 feet between the console and the sensors, while a few premium stations can function up to 1000 feet away.

Particularly, when the weather station is connected through the LoRaWAN® network, the transmission distance can be significantly increased to 2 – 10km, or even 20km depending on the gateway, antenna, chip’s capability, and environment.

Internet Connectivity
The wireless weather stations can be connected via an APP or web portal to enable data visualization and device management, whether it is communicated through Wi-Fi or LoRaWAN®. Make sure you choose the one with a built-in data platform to organize the weather observations for it allows you to monitor your weather conditions remotely and timely.

Durability
Everyone would expect their home weather stations to function perfectly in years. Lower-end weather stations apply cheaper and subsequently less durable materials and offer inexpensive models. If you wish your station to function year-round, and in potentially extreme conditions, you might need to afford a high-end type that lasts a whole lot longer than the average product.

Adding LoRa® to the Weather Station

At present, the data transmission of most weather stations on the market is realized through Wi-Fi, which has limitations in distance and energy saving.
As IoT and big data are becoming more prevalent, massive data collection through sensors is required to facilitate digital transformation, and new technologies regarding network protocols are getting requested to enable home weather stations to transfer data over the widest possible range with the lowest possible power consumption.

Combining LoRaWAN® transmission technology, SenseCAP S2120 8-in-1 LoRaWAN® weather station offers possibilities to create low power consumption weather systems over a long-range transmission. It comes with all the necessary sensors to collect and upload air temperature, humidity, wind speed/direction, rainfall, light intensity, UV index, and barometric pressure data via the LoRaWAN® network to cover long-range distances, providing stable and reliable readings on the supporting APP and portal.

Final Thoughts

As the home weather station market advances each year, observing the weather at home with a personal weather station has never been easier and it is now a perfect time for you to build one, whether it is for business purposes or life needs.

Home weather stations can provide a localized forecast based on actual readings. Even low-end types can generate an early warning if there’s extreme weather inbound. A high-end home weather station always lasts longer and provides more accurate data on every observation. If it has LoRaWAN® transmission capability, these features can always be upgraded to the industrial level.

Whether or not you need to spend a fortune on a high-end setup is eventually down to personal choice, but you can always benefit from owning a strong and robust home weather station.

(Hint: The LoRa® Mark is a trademark of Semtech Corporation or its subsidiaries. LoRaWAN® is a mark used under license from the LoRa Alliance®.)

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