Design, Development and Implementation of a Low Cost Weather Station for high mountains

This research is based on the need to have a measurement tool to carry out different studies that require meteorological information in high mountain areas, therefore, a low-cost weather station based on open source is designed and implemented. The design process considered the inclusion of the directives of the World Meteorological Organization and the place of installation. Then we continued with the assembly and installations in conjunction with a Campbell Scientific station (3800 m) and a HOBO station (5000 m), in order to compare their records. The Arduino Mega 2560 controller used as a datalogger responded adequately, the data captured when compared are very similar to those of the stations. The average difference between the low-cost station and the other two is in temperature 0.193 °C, humidity 1.3% RH, atmospheric pressure 0.14 mbar, solar radiation 5.8%, soil temperature 0.127 °C, wind speed 0.485 m/s and wind direction 1.33°. The cost benefit is 4 to 18 times compared to purchasing a commercial station and certified instrumentation.