About the Weather Station Instruments

The instruments used for the BYU Physics & Astronomy Weather Station were acquired from Texas Electronics. They are interfaced (mostly through locally developed signal conditioning) to an analog input board from National Instruments which is in a PC running Windows XP. The software to acquire, massage, display, and archive the data is a "built" executable developed using the LabVIEW programming environment.

Details:

Thermometer - Texas Electronics TT-101 resistive sensor using a themistor-resistor network with an operating range of -40^o to +120^o F.
Hygrometer - Texas Electronics TH-2013QR capacitive sensor. The range is 0 to 100% relative humidity with an accuray of +/-3%.
Barometer - Texas Electronics TB-2012M solid-state sensor. It has a range of 21.4" to 27.4" Hg (absolute station pressure). Over this range it has an accuray of +/-0.04" Hg.
Anemometer - Texas Electronics TV-114 16-pole AC generator with a starting threshold of 2.2 to 3.0 mph. a nominal operating range of 0 to 120 mph, and an accuray of +/- 2 mph over that range.
Wind Direction - Texas Electronics TD-104-5D resistive indicator. It has a mechanical range of 0^o to 360^o with an electrical range of 0^o to 357^o with a 3^o dead band. It has a starting threshold of 2.5 mph and an accuracy of about +/-4^o. Below 2.5 mph the indicated direction is generally in the actual wind direction but can vary widely.
Rainfall - Texas Electronics TR-6118 tipping bucket rain gauge. It has a resolution of 0.01" with an accuracy of 1% at 2" rainfall/hour.
Solar Radiation - Texas Electronics TS-100 photovoltaic thermopile. It has a range of 0 to 1400 W/m² with an accuracy of +/-5%.

Analog input board - National Instruments PCI-MIO-16E-4 multifunction board.

Computer - 1.0 GHz Pentium III.

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