Weather Station installed on Sensor Relay Pole RP3 deployment at Orpheus Island as part of the Facility for the Automated Intelligent Monitoring of Marine Systems - FAIMMS

A Vaisala WXT520 integrated weather station has been installed on RP3, a 6m steel pole, which has been installed at Orpheus Island on the central Great Barrier Reef. The sensor-relay pole provides a platform for the installation of sensors to measure and monitor water conditions at Orpheus Island. The pole has real time communications using 900MHz spread spectrum radio back to a base station on Orpheus 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 Orpheus Island and then a Telstra nextG link is used to send the data back to AIMS.

Identical weather stations are also on Heron Island (southern GBR), One Tree Island (near by) and Lizard Island (northern GBR). A light sensor is also located on the Island itself to give measures of PAR.