Anitun Tabu: Automated Microweather Station

Abstract

Weather forecasting is essential for people due to its roles—to mitigate the possible hazards, to adapt the people, and to prepare the community—in monitoring conditions within the atmosphere. Furthermore, due to the inevitable changes of weather condition that need to be forecasted, the quantity of automatic weather stations is oddly distributed and infrequent to provide information over the entire Philippine archipelago, according to Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) last 2017. Anitun Tabu: Automated MicroweatherStation is fabricated to mitigate, adapt, and prepare the community for contemporary weather conditions. This instrument aims to provide real-time information that is beneficial in both urban and rural areas. The device was equipped with various sensors that can measure weather parameters such as air pressure, air temperature, wind speed, relative humidity, wind direction, rain amount, UV index, and river water level. An Arduino Software IDE v1.8.3 was used as a software-programming tool. Calibration measurements made by Anitun Tabu are relatively similar to the capacity made by PAGASA using Percentage Error Analysis. At 5% level of significance, the median of weather parameters—air pressure, air temperature, humidity and wind speed—obtained by standard PAGASA devices are not statistically significantly different to the median of measurements made by the fabricated device. This study showed that Anitun Tabu is a low cost and portable weather station, which is advantageous in both urban and rural areas. Moreover, it is accurate as the commercially available automated weather stations in transmitting weather updates for disaster mitigation.