Weather Station Network

Map I made of Commuter Rail locations (2021)

Weather Station Network Installation

Summer 2021

For the summer of 2021, I worked for Keolis Commuter Services as part of the mechanical department, installing a weather station network to care for the Boston Commuter Rail trains. The internship involved four big tasks required to install and integrate the network's data in the ten weeks I had. The steps were: station installation, python coding, SQL coding, and creating a power BI user interface. The project was important because having accurate weather data meant the decision about when to take extra precautions against freezing trains could be made more accurately, more efficiently, and more immediately. The computer system I built automatically checked the weather every four hours and could sort the data to determine which areas, if any, were in danger of freezing. It then knew to send out notifications to those locations to inform them about the freezing danger. This project saved the company at least $2,000/yr in employee time and avoided millions of dollars in fines and freeze damage.

Weather Station Installation Map

This diagram shows the weather station, its components, and the fourteen locations around the Boston where the stations were installed to create a network of weather data.

Data Pathway

This shows the steps I went through over the summer and the path the weather data follows to get from readings of the station all the way to the user interface for employees to use. The weather stations were from Davis instruments so automatically uploaded data to that website. Then, I wrote python code to make an API call and retrieve and sort the data before sending it into SQL. The python code is run every four hours to automatically bring the data from the stations into Keolis' SQL database. Then Power BI accesses the SQL database to create graphs and tables that the user can then view through a Power BI dashboard.

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