3a manages agro-meteorological networks for its customer base, guaranteeing that data is acquired with continuity, controlled, memorized and processed. A variety of software packages, developed internally or adapted to the specific business needs, are geared towards the management of data transmitted by peripheral units. In addition to providing IT support, the operator's subjective contribution is indispensable, as the latter inspects the operation of the monitoring system on a daily basis.

Summary of operations performed by the control centre:

Data acquisition and archiving: the control centre queries the peripheral stations once or more times a day, depending on the customer's needs. Operating modes can be automatic or manual; data downloaded by the stations is archived in an orderly manner in company server databases.

Reconstruction of data sets: the control centre highlights missing data and performs a series of procedures for the interpolation and reconstruction of the data; in agro-meteorology, it is essential that data sets be complete, and this is achieved through linear regression and spatial interpolation methods, which reconstruct data with a high level of accuracy.

Data validation: the quality of data is evaluated according to internal criteria (range and coherence) or external criteria (comparison with data from nearly localities). Here too, the operator's intervention is essential, with a good knowledge of territorial characteristics for the sites, physical phenomenon monitored and their peculiarities.

Data visualization and transmission: 3a offers a Web service that includes the automatic publication of agro-meteorological data on protected internet pages. Customers can view their data, download data tables and view graphics directly from their browser. Various data processing operations can thus be performed online, rendering the desired agro-meteorological information interpretable.In addition, the FTP (acronym for File Transfer Protocol) procedure can also be enabled, providing a data transmission system to and from a web server. Using an FTP, users can enable a remote connection with our servers to download daily files and timetables for archived agro-meteorological data.

Warning systems: 3a provides a warning system based on identifying threshold values which constitute real value quantitative indicators for the insurgence of an alert situation. A threshold value is understood as the value for a given monitored parameter for which an alert level is triggered when the said value has been reached.

Two different types of alarms are distinguished:

1. current adverse events (late frosts, strong winds, storms ...)
2. processing of weather data (persistence of precipitation, water balance, leaf wetness accumulation ...)

Modelling: weather data collected can be used in numerous agronomical applications: evapo-transpiration calculations, water balance, creating phonological and phytosanitary models... In this field, 3a develops customized applications that create and send files containing the input variables required to run the agronomical models used by the customer.