Cloud-based monitoring system for lysimetric and agroclimatic data

Abstract

The availability of irrigation water is one of the main concerns in Mediterranean agriculture. For this reason, it is so important to accurately determine the water needs of the crop in order to optimize the use of scarce water resources. This paper presents the design and operation validation of an agroclimatic data acquisition system composed of a set of wireless nodes with different functionalities to ascertain irrigation requirements based on weather and lysimetric data. These nodes were based on a common single-board computer to which, depending on the required features, additional hardware components were added. A comparative study of the different single-board computers available in the market was conducted and the Raspberry Pi device was selected due its high performance to cost ratio. With this philosophy, the design of two types of nodes was proposed: climate nodes and lysimetric nodes. Software drivers were developed for both to perform data acquisition and to send the measurements through a mobile network to an application hosted in the cloud. This application managed the storage of the data in a structured-relational database. The required interfaces were programmed to allow the user to view historical and real-time data, as well as configure additional parameters of the nodes related to the crop, geographical location and so on. This cloud application is accessible from any computer or mobile device with an internet connection. All the software tools and hardware platforms were low-cost and open source. Various performance tests were carried out both in the laboratory and in the field, obtaining evapotranspiration measurements consistent with the reference evapotranspiration calculated from data of the climate node.