Software Development for SonicSonde Instrumentation Suite

The SonicSonde is an innovative weather instrumentation suite for boundary layer sampling. Software development included creating a graphical user interface (GUI) to receive, process, archive, and display data in real-time. Targeted at the Windows operating system but with multi-platform extensibility in mind, the GUI was developed using Qt 5.14 in C++. A key design consideration was to allow for tailored displays and analysis while also permitting additional sensors to be added to the platform. As such, the application relies heavily on flexible interfaces and multithreading processing for capturing, modelling, and plotting data. The object-oriented nature of Qt made it ideal for this purpose. The application supports input through live serial streams and static .csv or .dat files, custom meteorological graphs, and user-dictated panel views and output intervals. Additionally, the GUI displays real-time information about the state of the instrument. The versatility of the SonicSonde will allow meteorologists and researchers to perform or better support a variety of aeronautic and atmospheric missions.