Sensor data acquisition for climate change modelling

This paper describes recent advances in sensor technology and wireless radio frequency (telemetry architecture) with the capability for measuring changes in weather and atmospheric conditions that permit modellers to analyse the climate change, its variability and effects on viticulture across the world’s major wine producing regions. When combined with GPS (global positioning system) functionality enabling geo-referenced information to be gathered and analysed in real-time, new opportunities emerge for the development of wireless sensor networks (WSN) for decision making in precision agriculture (PA). The use of WSN technologies in precision viticulture (PV) to date is mostly confined to on-farm and narrow regions within a city or in the case of a larger region the data collection is limited to monitoring weather conditions alone. This paper reviews three application scenarios: a) within a vineyard b) regionally within the state of Washington in the USA and c) cities within the Asia Pacific Region. It then details the development of a system proposed for comparative analysis of viticulture management information from two countries, namely Chile and New Zealand that have the same latitude but are at different longitude points. The paper looks at a variety of remotely located real-time sensors (telemetry devices), associated hardware devices (server, workstation, architectures and topologies) and software suitable for data collection, logging, distribution and streaming. Data gathered by the sensors is relayed via a series of repeaters to a workstation, which logs the data and is connected directly to the Internet for transmission to a server acting as the final collection and data analysis point for a comparative information matching synthesis. The data collected is to be used for building models that could enhance our understanding about the effects of climate change on grapevine growth and wine quality within major wine regions in the two countries being studied in this initial research. Finally, the paper describes variable parameters considered for analysis in this research so far in relation to plant growth, weather, climate, atmospheric influences such as climate change, pollution and also wine quality determinants such as soil, terrain and grape variety. Key-Words: Telemetry devices, plant growth factors, weather data, GPS and precision viticulture.