A Vaisala WXT520 integrated weather station has been installed on RP5, a 6m steel pole, which has been installed within the lagoon of Heron Island as part of the sensor network infrastructure at Heron Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef off Gladstone, Australia.
The sensor-relay pole provides a platform for the installation of sensors to measure and monitor water conditions within the lagoon of Heron Island. The pole has real time communications using 900MHz spread spectrum radio back to a base station on Heron Island.
The weather station provides measurement of air temperature (Deg. C.), humidity as relative percent, barometric pressure (milliBars or hPa), rainfall amount, intensity and duration, hail amount, intensity and duration (not common on coral reefs!) and wind speed and direction. The wind speed and direction and processed into scalar and vector (directional) based readings and presented as 10 and 30 minute averages to give mean values and maximum values. From these you can get the average wind conditions at either 10 minute or 30 minute periods as well as the gust or maximum wind conditions.
The weather station is connected via an SDI-12 interface to a Campbell Scientific CR1000 logger which uses a RF411 radio to transmit the data, every 10 minutes, to the base station on Heron Island and then a Telstra nextG link is used to send the data back to AIMS.
Identical weather stations are also on One Tree Island (near by), Orpheus Island (central GBR) and Lizard Island (northern GBR). A light sensor is also located on the Island itself to give measures of PAR.