Pressure-based prediction of harvestable energy for powering environmental monitoring systems

Environmental monitoring systems are useful for the study of various natural phenomena. They are often deployed in remote locations, making their reliability and energy independence important. This leads to the use of energy harvesting technologies that allow the sensor platforms to operate either independently or for extended periods of time. However, it is also important to maintain quality of the collected data, namely its temporal resolution for a given purpose. To balance the trade-off between these two aspects, an energy management scheme is required. The performance of such schemes strongly depends on the accuracy of the energy forecast, often used as one of their inputs. In this contribution, several methods of varying complexity are used to predict the total amount of daily solar energy available for harvest in the near future. All proposed methods are based solely on atmospheric surface pressure, with the aim of keeping the prediction algorithm as simple as possible.