Presionet

Presionet is a distributed network and data platform designed to monitor atmospheric pressure and related environmental conditions at high spatial granularity. It combines a mesh of low-cost pressure sensors with open-data services, enabling real-time monitoring, historical analysis, and research.

The network emphasizes accessibility; sensor nodes transmit measurements via wireless links to regional hubs, where data are quality-controlled, standardized to common units (hectopascals for pressure, degrees Celsius for temperature), and published through an open API and portal.

Development of the concept emerged in the early 2010s as researchers and open-science communities explored crowd-sourced and institutional deployments to augment traditional meteorological networks.

Technology and architecture: Nodes typically include a barometer, temperature and humidity sensors, a microcontroller, power source (solar or battery), and a radio interface (LoRa, cellular). Data pipelines perform quality control checks, time synchronization, and interpolation to generate gridded products such as real-time surface-pressure maps and regionally aggregated time series.

Applications: Presionet supports weather forecasting validation, climate research, urban flood risk assessment, aviation safety, agriculture, and education. By increasing measurement density, it can help capture microscale pressure variability associated with topography, land use, and weather fronts.

Governance and access: The project typically adopts open data policies and community governance, with licensing that encourages reuse while ensuring privacy and security for any participant-associated data.

Limitations and challenges: Ensuring data quality across heterogeneous sensors, maintaining calibration, and achieving dense geographic coverage—especially in mountainous or remote regions—pose ongoing challenges. Sustainability depends on longer-term funding, maintenance, and community engagement.

See also: Sensor networks, Atmospheric pressure monitoring, Open data portals.