SNOWWEB - Wirelessly connected weather stations in Antarctica

Abstract

Antarctica is a harsh and challenging continent to study, particularly with regard to scientific equipment. This paper presents SNOWWEB, a Wireless Sensor Network equipped with environmental sensors designed to capture distributed meteorological measurements in Antarctica and report them in real-time to a base station. To accomplish this we used XBee Pro S2B transceivers utilising the ZigBee standard. Combined with high gain omnidirectional antennae we were able to establish reliable multi-hop links with inter-node distances spanning up to 10 km during testing in Antarctica in January 2013. Over a one week period we experienced exceptional network performance, despite a snowstorm, with all stations reporting as expected. © 2013 IEEE.