Weather Monitoring for the Air and Climate Industry - Air and Climate

OWI-430 series Optical Weather Identifiers

OSI’s Scintillation based sensor measures precipitation, present Weather and Visibility.

• Measurement of instantaneous rain rate; Instant notification of precipitation.  No lag period Discriminates between rain, snow, drizzle, freezing drizzle, freezing rain, etc.
• Reports over 60 NWS and WMO codes
• Detect rainfall extremely high rain rates > 1000 mm/hr or as light as 0.1 mm/hr; no evaporation errors
• Widely used by NOAA / NWS, military, airports, state DOTs, etc.
• Reduced maintenance.  No moving parts; operates 24/7 under harsh field conditions.
• Dust / dirt on lenses does not affect measurement; ultra-low maintenance
• Intelligent sensor; automatic correction and continuous internal monitoring; operates unattended.  Algorithms continually refined from over 800 million hours of proven field operation in applications on every continent. Technology field proven for over 30 years (long track record)
• All digital / DSP based design with no temperature sensitive analog components.

Optical Scientifics OWI-430 utilizes signals from forward optical scatter, in-beam (optical scintillation), ambient light, temperature, and humidity to accurately determine meteorological optical range (visibility), precipitation type (rain, snow, hail, drizzle, etc.) and precipitation amount.

• OWI-430 also reports atmospheric extinction coefficient and ambient light levels  required by RVR algorithm
• Transmitter (TX) contains an infrared Light Emitting Diode (LED)
• Receiver (RX) contains two (2) independent optical receiver assemblies, each consisting of a photo diode, lens with dual heaters, and pre-amplifier electronics
• One of the receivers detects present weather (in-beam) and the other detects visibility (forward scatter).

HIPS (hail & Ice Pellet sensor)

• With the addition of the acoustic hail and ice pellet sensor (HIPS) the OWI-430 provides superior snow, ice pellet, hail and freezing rain discrimination, far surpassing all other visibility/present weather sensors

OWI-430 series sensors work on moving platforms

• Eco-friendly – No antifreeze or oil required. 
• works with solar power and satellite or GSM communications allowing for easy installation in very remote areas.
• Other sensors can be added without requiring a data logger.
• Extra I/O capability allows the OWI sensors to be used as stand-alone Weather Nodes, which will send out a single string of data to the cloud or an existing software system.

Applications for accurate measurements of Precipitation, Present Weather and Visibility 

• Airports
• Road Weather
• Waste Water - Storm Water monitoring
• Irrigation
• ambient air stations (wet deposits vs dry deposits)
• avalanche studies (history of precipitation types)
• railways (icing)
• solar and wind farms (precipitation types)