Storing weather data and dissemination via the web

Abstract

As part of a much larger project, significant progress has been made toward making localized weather data available to the research community and even to the general public through the Internet. A weather station, installed on the roof of McNair Hall on the campus of North Carolina A&T State University, captures weather data and a C++ program accesses the data and stores it in a MySQL database. As of now, the data is accessed using PHP and made available in various forms. The data is being published on the Web in fixed intervals throughout each day. With KML, weather statistics are also available on Google Earth. There, users have access to the weather data through an icon at the location of the sensor, which, when clicked, displays a link to our weather page. Users also have the option of viewing calculated statistics or current weather data for the past 24 h, 7 days, weeks, or even months. Though significant, this work is only a small first step toward using grid computing and multiagent systems for real-time sensor control and data management in large sensor networks. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009.