A
low-cost airborne sensor mote has been designed for deployment en masse to
characterize atmospheric conditions. The designed environmental sensing mote,
or eMote, was inspired by the natural shape of auto-rotating maple seeds to
fall slowly and gather data along its descent. The eMotes measure and transmit
temperature, air pressure, relative humidity, and wind speed estimates
alongside GPS coordinates and timestamps. Up to 2080 eMotes can be deployed
simultaneously with a 1 Hz sampling rate, but the system capacity increases by
2600 eMotes for every second added between samples. All measured and reported
data falls within accuracy requirements for reporting with both the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This paper presents the
design and validation of the eMote system alongside discussions on the
implementation of a large-scale, low-cost sensor network. The eMote represents unprecedented in-situ atmospheric measurement
capabilities with the ability to deploy more than 260 times the number of
sensing units as the most comparable commercially available dropsonde.
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