Development of an Automatic Wireless System Applied for Soil Temperature Measurement

Soil temperature is an important hydrologic parameter which affects exchanges of sensible and latent heat between the land surface and the atmosphere. A data acquisition system based on an 18F8887 microcontroller, which scans 10 sensors together at intervals programmable from one minute to one hour, is implemented for soil temperature measurements. The data are stored in a removable, non-volatile random access memory and transferred via ZigBee wireless communication to a control center for processing and displaying. This system is versatile and easily transportable. It has been used to supervise the evolution of the temperature in the soil at different depths.