Smart street lamp weather stations like the MeteoHelix® IoT Pro are able to produce research quality climate change data even in urban environments dominated by pavement and sun-baked walls.

Installations on lamp posts are ideal as they put distance between weather stations and sun-heated walls of buildings so that weather stations can do their job properly. While urban weather stations equipped with a helical MeteoShield® Professional are able to accurately measure air temperature even in direct sunlight with accompanying sun reflections and radiating heat sources, care must still be taken to choose an installation location representative of the environmental factors which one wants to measure.

Care must be taken to install urban weather stations such that artificially heated air does not feed directly into them. This will result in the measurements being dominated by hyper-local meteorological phenomenon. If one wants to measure the extremes of urban heat island effects, this will be acceptable, but if the goal is to quantify the urban climate over a larger area, lamp post and street light installations are an ideal choice.

The accompanying photos show a street lighting installation of a BARANI DESIGN Technologies MeteoHelix® IoT Pro and SEB50 rain gauge within an urban building complex.