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° F to +120° F with an accuracy of ±1° in the range of -30° F to 110° F. Acquisition precision is ±0.01° F.
Hygrometer - Texas Electronics TH-2013QR capacitive sensor. The range is 0 to 100% relative humidity with an accuracy of ±3%. Acquisition precision is ±0.002%.
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 accuracy of ±0.04" Hg. Acquisition precision is ±0.0001" 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 accuracy of ±2 mph over that range. Acquisition precision is ±0.005 mph.
Wind Direction - Texas Electronics TD-104-5D resistive indicator. It has a mechanical range of 0° to 360° with an electrical range of 0° to 357° with a 3° dead band. It has a starting threshold of 2.5 mph and an accuracy of about ±4°. Acquisition precision is about ±1.5°. 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 USB-6110 multifunction board.

Computer - Dell Optiplex 745 (Small Form Factor case) with a 2.13 GHz Intel Core2 6400 CPU and 2.0 GB Ram.

Return to Weather Home Page.

Contact the BYU ESC weather station manager with questions or comments about this page.