Towards Collaborative Weather Sensing: An SDR-Based Interoperability Gateway for Weather Information Aggregation (SIGWA)

Weather Monitoring Systems available in the market are typically closed systems that are designed to work only with other equipment from the same manufacturer. This hinders the collection of information from a variety of weather stations, preventing denser data collection and better observation of weather patterns through collaborative weather sensing among individuals and institutions. We leveraged the programmability of software-defined radios (SDRs) to enable collecting data from multiple, heterogeneous weather stations by a single radio. We developed a weather station gateway equipped with SDRs that are programmed to receive and decode information from weather stations that use different protocols and operate at distinct frequencies. Data from these stations are stored both locally and online, with update intervals being real-time for the local storage and every 15 minutes for the online database. Deployment results show reliable data reception from the heterogeneous weather stations over a 24-hour period.