Leveraging Inter-Institutional Connectivity to Facilitate Weather Data Transmission from Automatic Weather Stations in Uganda

The use of Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) for Environment monitoring by the Uganda National Meteorological Authority has increased massively over the past 15 years. This increase is mainly due to the savings in time, energy and money that are usually accompanied by the use of Information Technology to replace manual organizational processes. These stations collect various weather data and automatically transmit this data to a central repository, usually a physical server in a relatively remote location. The transmission of this data, in Uganda, is achieved primary by GSM/GPRS over the backbone of one of the national service provider. While GPRS speeds are probably sufficient for the small amounts of data from these AWS, the consequence of this is a regular cost to the authority, not only in financial terms but also poor connectivity in remote areas, downtime and high power consumption. Since universities in Uganda are spread across the country with considerable spatial separation, it is possible that the UNMA (Uganda National Meteorological Authority) could place a number of AWSs at these campuses and still cover many climatological zones and, equally importantly, benefit from transmitting the AWS data through the networks at these universities that have been set-up by the national NREN, RENU. Because this data volume is very low, the cost of such transmission would be almost zero and other advantages would be manifested, such as the very limited involvement in communication channel maintenance and a higher availability of power. In this paper, we investigate the practical consequences that leveraging inter-institutional NREN connectivity would bring to a government authority like UNMA. We analyze the impact that this would have on the cost, operation and reliability of the whole AWS.

乌干达国家气象管理局（Uganda National Meteorological Authority，UNMA）使用自动气象站（Automatic Weather Stations, AWS）进行环境监测的规模在过去15年中大幅增长。这种增长主要得益于信息技术替代人工组织流程所带来的时间、能源和资金节约。这些站点收集各类气象数据，并自动将数据传输至中央存储库——通常是位于相对偏远地区的物理服务器。在乌干达，此类数据的传输主要通过一家全国性服务提供商骨干网络上的GSM/GPRS实现。尽管GPRS速度对于这些AWS产生的少量数据而言或许足够，但这会给管理局带来持续成本——不仅包括财务支出，还涉及偏远地区连接性差、停机时间长以及功耗高等问题。由于乌干达的大学在全国范围内分布广泛，空间间隔较大，UNMA可在这些校园部署若干AWS，仍能覆盖众多气候区；且同样重要的是，可借助国家研究与教育网络（National Research and Education Network, NREN）——即乌干达的RENU——搭建的大学网络传输AWS数据，进而从中获益。由于此类数据量极小，传输成本几乎为零，且能体现其他优势，例如通信信道维护参与度极低、电力可用性更高等。本文探讨了利用机构间NREN连接性为UNMA这类政府机构带来的实际影响，并分析了其对整个AWS系统的成本、运营及可靠性产生的作用。