University of Hamburg
2014
CTS was approached by the Botswana Meteorological Department and the University of Hamburg with the request to install automatic weather stations across Botswana. A total of 10 stations were engineered and build at our workshop in Windhoek prior to installation commencement. With our own tower design, the installation time is reduced to nearly 8 hours per tower.
The stations are equipped with sensors from Vaisala, Kipp and Zonen. At the heart of each station is the CR1000 logger from Campbell Scientific. Each station is capable to measure the following:
- Wind speed
- Wind direction
- Humidity
- Air Temperature
- Irradiance
- Barometric pressure
- Ground Temperature
- Rain
- Leaf wetness
In addition to the above parameters the following parameters are calculated by the logger by means of mathematical models.
- Dew point temperature
- Wet bulb temperature
- Sunshine duration
The data from the station is transmitted to ftp servers situated in Gaborone/Botswana as well as Hamburg/Germany on an hourly bases over locally available GSM network providers. Once the data is uploaded to the server in Hamburg, it is processed and posted on a publicly available website. This website collects data of numerous stations across Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Angola and South Africa for research purposes. A total of 8000km was covered in just under 4 weeks.
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