Realization of Measurement Station for Remote Environmental Monitoring

Abstract

The greenhouse effect is a naturally occurring process that heats the Earth's surface and atmosphere. It is a result of the fact that certain atmospheric gases, such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane, are able to change the energy balance of the planet by absorbing long wave radiation emitted from the Earth's surface. Number of gases are involved in the human caused enhancement of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is the most important gas of these gases, which contributes about 55% of the change in the intensity of the Earth's greenhouse effect. The global monitoring of the greenhouse gases is necessary for handling the global warming issue. This paper presents a practical implementation of a measurement station for environmental monitoring using Internet technology and large sensor networks. The application of the sensor networks in the environmental monitoring requires the development specific solutions. This paper presents a solution that relies on existing technology, but offers hardware and software upgrade due to the advantages of using the concept of virtual instrumentation. The application uses temperature sensors, air relative humidity sensors, gas sensors and others. The measurement station collects the data from the sensors and sends them to the users using the UDP protocol via the Internet and GPRS modem. The measurement station was implemented in LabVIEW programming package.