AirWare   On-line Reference Manual

  Release Level 5.4
  Release Date 2008 10
  Revision Level 1.0
Last modified on:   Monday, 20-Jul-09 14:03 CEST

OBJECT Data Base: Monitoring Station

Monitoring Stations describe the physical monitoring equipment, its location, and lead to the actual monitoring time series. This includes meteorological variables, emissions, and ambient concenatrtions. A special case are traffic observations in real time.

A Monitoring Station Object is defined by its HEADER including a hypertext page describing it, and the list selector for all the time series collected there.

Other attributes are grouped into topics that are shown in pop-up windows triggered by (optional) BUTTONS. They include:

  1. Links to other objects
  2. Administrative information
  3. Technical information

Time series (parameter) selection

Under the Object HEADER, the page displays a selector of available time series, organized in terms of their parameters. The selector (full page width) shows:
  1. Parameter name
  2. Last measurement (end date)
  3. First measurement (start date)
  4. Time step (symbolic, i.e., a STRING that can also indicate irregular sampling or bi-monthly);
  5. unit
  6. Number of observations
  7. Coverage in % (100-% of missing values).
The MONITORING TIME SERIES themselves consist of a HEADER, and the actual time-stamped values. TIME SERIES META DATA compiled during the import process, include:
  1. USER: (determined automatically)
  2. NAME: a descriptive (short) name for the time series that will be used in the selector list;
  3. TYPE: one of historical or real-time.
  4. DESCRIPTION: a free text field that defines, e.g., data source (such as the original monitoring station/sensor), method for patching, assumptions (for synthetic time series);
  5. LOCATION: defines the geographical scope (on import, this selected by the user from a list of pre-defined options, or generated automatically from the application's CONFIGURATION information if the data base covers a single location);
  6. VARIABLE: (or parameter selected from a pre-defined list) with its associated UNIT;
  7. START DATE: will be determined automatically from the time stamps of the imported data.
  8. TIME STEP: symbolic label for the time stamp (e.g., hourly, daily, monthly, irregular); internally, we can derive the time tep in minutes from the delta between the obervations;
  9. GENERATED: date of original imnport;
  10. LAST MODIFIED: date of last update, mainly for real-time data;

Attribute set

Other descriptive information is organized in two linked pages:

  1. Administrative information, describing the owner or operator, contact addresses etc.
  2. Technical information, describing the actual monitoring equipment used, telemetry, etc.

Data Items

Administrative information
  • Address block for the institution and a contact person with an optional second (local, on site) address, derived from the INSTITUTIONS data base, relational contact/address data base TABLE.

Technical information

    Sensors List of sensors/methods used for the parameters monitored; for each sensor, the following information can be stored and displayed in a separate pop-up window:
    1. Sensor name
    2. Hypertext link (URL) for descriptive text and optional imagery.
    3. Manufacturer
    4. Model name
    5. Sensor technology
    6. Year of installation
    7. Date of last maintenance/calibration


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