Development and Calibration of a Solar Powered Automatic Weather Station for the Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Parameters.

In this research, a weather station was design and assembled at the site of the Center for Renewable Energy Technology {CRET}, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria. The materials for the instrument includes a data logger with solar radiation sensor and an anemometer, wind vane, relative humidity sensor and air particulate matter sensors built within the instrument to track and record daily radiation and PV cell temperature. The equipment is powered by a 12 V, 45 AH Lithium battery.Inside the weather station is the integrated sensor suite {ISS} which is made up of solar panel temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction and solar radiation sensors installed to detect physical changes in the environment and output them as digital signals into the signal conditioning circuits. This signal conditioning circuit manipulates the signals and prepares them for the next stage of processing. From the signal conditioning circuits, the data are sent to the central processing unit that interpret the data received from the sensors, stores them in the data memory, access them and uses instructions stored in its programme memory to decipher and apply the incoming data. The instrument was calibrated in comparison with standard equipment’s and the results obtained were okay