Arduino Weather Station: Outdoor measurements

The time has come to measure the weather outside with the arduino weather station! I am most interested in measuring the snow height, so I really want to test it out during a snow storm.

Here it is! The finalized weather station outside. 

Now after it snows:

Pretty cool! Now we should have good measurements of snow height but something is wrong!?!

You can see it doesn't reliably work. The sensor I'm using does not always sense the layer of snow on the box! My guess is that the snow does not form a thick enough boundary for the sound wave from the ultrasonic sensor to bounce off of. To test my theory I am going to stick a cardboard piece on top of the snow and see what happens.

It works! Oh well... so much for a purely remote snow-height measuring device. The cardboard is likely providing a clear boundary to reflect the sound waves unlike the snow. I tried this in multiple snow storms in case it was random and this kept happening. For the snow I am trying to measure, the ultrasonic sensor I used does not seem to be the best choice. That's OK, at the end of the day I still have an awesome dashboard of weather metrics from the sensors sent to grafana seen below. To recap, I set this up in this post and also a bit in an earlier blog post.

Next steps, rain sensor!

If you have followed along, I hope this journey has been useful to you. If you are really excited by this, I love lattes!