A weather station comprises instruments or sensors that retrieve data for weather

analysis. These instruments/sensors are capable of recording air temperature, air

speed and direction, air humidity, solar pressure, rain, atmospheric pressure and other variables.

There are two kinds of weather station: automatic and conventional:

Automatic stations: fully automated data collection. In this type of station, sensors emit electrical signals, which are captured by a telemetry system allowing the storage and processing of data. Some stations, such as Agrosmart, allow this data to be monitored in real time for distance, even from extremely remote locations.

Conventional stations: requires the daily presence of a person to collect the

measured data. They are divided into classes according to the purpose and

the number of variables observed.

First class: are those that measure all meteorological elements.

Second class: do not measure atmospheric pressure, solar radiation and wind.

Third class: they measure only the maximum, minimum temperature and rain.

To obtain precise and representative data of an area, it is important to install the weather station in an appropriate local. For that, it is necessary to meet some demands:

• Flat location to avoid water accumulation and away from electrical installations;

• Wide horizons, without barriers that prevent solar radiation or change the characteristics of the wind. For this, the recommended distance between the station and the obstacle is at least 10 times the height of the obstacle;

• Distant from watercourses, lakes and wetlands, avoiding disturbances in the measurement of relative air humidity;

• Grassy or undergrown soil to minimize the influence of different types of soil texture.

Due to its greater practicality, currently the automatic weather station is the most used and it is the type of station that Agrosmart works. In addition, it is possible to check the data in real time over the internet using the Agrosmart service. The automatic stations have 4 essential sensors: the anemometer, pyranometer, the thermohygrometer (temperature and relative humidity sensor) and the rain gauge. Other sensors might be installed on request.

Check out what each sensor does:

According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO or WMO) (2010), the representative area of a weather station can cover a radius of up to 100 km around it. However, this occurs only in ideal situations; that is, flat regions, without sharp orography, large bodies of water and significant differences in vegetation. In regions where the orography is quite irregular, the representational radius of the meteorological stations drops to 10 to 25 km (Nunes, 2004).

In addition, not every variable has the same spatial representativeness. For example, precipitation is a discrete variable, so it is spatially quite irregular.

The representativeness of the suggested weather station is 25 km at Agrosmart. However, it is recommended to install extra rain gauges when the localized rain measurement is needed.

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