Smart
phone, smart TV, smart chair.
With everything becoming
“smart,” the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) collaborated with
the Advanced Science Technology Institute of the Department of Science and Technology
(DOST) to automate the collection and retrieval of weather data.
Through the partnership, the
Philippine Real-Time Environment Data Acquisition and Interpretation for
Climate-Related Tragedy Prevention and Mitigation or PREDICT project—an advanced
data retrieval system for weather stations, was developed.
Dr. Jasper Tallada, PhilRice
consultant and engineer, said that “with climate change threats at fore, the
road to smarter alternatives is the way to go.”
“Documentation of weather or
climate data is significantly important to help farmers and researchers plan
their activities by looking at weather patterns. This includes temperature,
wind speed and direction, soil temperature and moisture, groundwater level and
temperature, solar radiation, ultraviolet index, rainfall, and other
weather-related factors relevant to rice farming,” he said.
Tallada said manual data
gathering requires intensive field monitoring to ensure that weather conditions
are well-recorded.
“PhilRice has been collecting
weather data since 1985. Retrieval of data was difficult since you have to
personally go to the field and regularly record one-by-one the numerous climate
parameters using various instruments. Once missed, the weather condition that
has passed at a particular time is also gone. PREDICT now automates the
collection of data and stores them in a computer database 24/7 in real-time,
downloadable whenever needed,” he explained.
With the new data logging and
retrieval system, researchers will just download the information through
http://fmon.asti.dost.gov.ph/weather/predict/ or via text messaging. The
request will be sent to the agromet stations that will automatically respond to
the sender. (PhilRice)
Comments
Post a Comment