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Ghent University studies urban micro-climatic differences within Ghent

Monday 15 May: The importance of good communication

If you had a look during the last days at the realtime maps and graphs of the MOCCA stations, you should have remarked some strange issues. Below you find the temperature graph for the last 24 hours.
Temperatuur 15/05/2017 21u00
During the day 4 out of the 6 MOCCA stations started to send again observations to the server.

Friday just before midnight all weather stations lost contact with the UGent server i.e. they did no longer sent their observations to the server. If there are no new data coming in, the graphs on the website recycle the latest data received. This explains the horizontal lines in the graphs. It happened already a few times that communication was lost for some time but Friday -at the beginning of the weekend of course- all 6 stations lost contact nearly at the some time. This was new.

If we do not receive data from a station, we typically have 3 suspects:
  • UGent server problems
  • power cut at MOCCA station switching off the modem
  • communication problems
As the first 2 reasons can be excluded (UGent server had no problems and there were no electricity cuts in Gent) it should have been the communication itself. As realtime data visualization adds value to this project it was decided to equip each weather station with a modem and antenna. This module communicates observations via GPRS each 5 minutes. GPRS communication was chosen as it is relatively simple, cheap, wireless and quite stable... untill last Friday. Probably a network problem interrupted all communication of the MOCCA stations.

After more than 48 hours the MOCCA station in Melle started again to communicate to the server, followed some hours later by MOCCA botanical garden. In the afternoon we manually restarted the modems of the stations Provinciehuis and St Bavo. And tomorrow we will do the same for the 2 remaining stations. Apart from some extra work and strange graphs on the website such a communication problem is not problematic as all data are also saved on a SD card in the data logger (memory to save data for more than 20 years).

The MOCCA network will thus be ready for a potentially interesting weather week: some warm days (>25 C) followed maybe in the second half of the week by finally significant rain for the thirsty rain gauges...