Remote monitoring and data management of the IDPA-CNR station in Col Margherita, San Pellegrino pass, Dolomites

The Institute for the Dynamics of Environmental Processes (IDPA) of the CNR runs a monitoring station located in a remote area in Col Margherita. The monitoring cabin was installed in the summer of 2012 in the frame of the EU - FP7 project Global Mercury Observation System (GMOS). The site is located in the Dolomites, in the Province of Belluno (BL), near Moena, Italy. The monitoring station is at a height of 2530 m above sea level at latitude +46o 22' 2.11" and longitude +11o 48' 23.03" and it is accessible from the San Pellegrino pass. As the site isn't easy reachable, proper hardware and software technologies for data-logging and remote control has to be used. During the last year we developed a solid and scalable system capable to interface sensors, cameras and instruments for monitoring aerosol, mercury, ozone. Our system is mainly based on Gnu-Linux and integrates serial commu- nication, LabView and Python for data acquisitions and validations. Bash, crontab, scp and rsync are used for copy and synchronizing data between different physical and virtual devices. R is used for statistical analysis and Shiny and Sweave are used for data visualization and automatic re- porting. We are using National Instrument, Campbell Scientific, Raspberry and Arduino hardwares. Ideal solutions for cloud storage and data management in accordance with OGC standards and open data was also taken into account.