A Low-Cost Wireless Temperature Sensor: Evaluation for Use in Environmental Monitoring Applications

A wide range of environmental applications would benefit from a dense network of air temperature observations. However, with limitations of costs, existing siting guidelines, and risk of damage, new methods are required to gain a high-resolution understanding ofspatiotemporal patterns oftemperature for agricultural and urbanmeteorologicalphenomenasuchastheurbanheatisland.Withthelaunchofanewgenerationoflow-cost sensors, it is possible to deploy a network to monitor air temperature at finer spatial resolutions. This study investigates the Aginova Sentinel Micro (ASM) sensor with a custom radiation shield (together less than USD$150) that can provide secure near-real-time air temperature data to a server utilizing existing (or user deployed) Wi-Fi networks. This makes it ideally suited for deployment where wireless communications readily exist,notablyurbanareas.AssessmentoftheperformanceoftheASMrelativetotraceablestandardsinawater bath and atmospheric chamber show it to have good measurement accuracy with mean errors ,60.228 Cb etween 2258 and 308C, with a time constant in ambient air of 110 615s. Subsequent field tests also showed the ASM (in the custom shield) had excellent performance (RMSE 5 0.138C) over a range of meteorological conditions relative to a traceable operational Met Office platinum resistance thermometer. These results indicate that the ASM and radiation shield are more than fit for purpose for dense network deployment in environmental monitoring applications at relatively low cost compared to existing observation techniques.

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