Thank you, Mattk, for your reply. Appreciate you taking the time.
The field station where the weather station would be placed is powered entirely by solar, with all accommodation and facilities hooked to the solar setup. Over the past 5 years, the solar power has been reliable. There is an inverter, so power is available as AC. A direct DC setup can be arranged but it would complicate matters. As it stands, hooking up a weather station to the existing solar setup should not be problem as we have plenty of spare capacity.
Wi-fi connectivity is another issue altogether. I achieve connectivity through hot-spotting off of my cell-phone. So this is occasional and only as needed. There is intermittent 4G cell based connectivity, but most of the time it is just 3G. Cell phone reception is for the most part reliable if you find the right spot, with outages maybe once or twice in 30 days. In general, for the times when I will not be at the station, wi-fi connectivity will not be a possibility, and a field assistant will be asked to download data once or twice a month depending on his / her availability. I assume this would be done via a wired hookup to the weather station if that is possible. If needed - and if there is no way out - wi-fi can be provided but that would complicate matters too. I understand the field station will be getting wi-fi installed sometime in the next 2 years, but I do not know the specifics of when this will be done (and as with most things out there, no guarantee it will actually happen).
You are correct - uploads to WU are simply a luxury that would be nice to have, but not a necessity. The need is to collect rainfall data, temperature, with high's and lows being of particular importance, humidity, pressure and wind direction. Wind speed is not a priority but would be desired. Hours of sunlight, UV, cloud cover and such would be nice but are not of direct relevance to the work we are doing.
The main requirement is a robust weather station that can survive a tropical storm, hail, rainfall in excess of 3000 mm per year, and, most importantly, can work without wifi and have enough capacity to hold data for at least a month in case the station is shut down. I do not know much about weather stations, so I am not sure what specs to look for. I was looking at these AcuRite models: 01540M, 01208M, 01536P, 1512X2, 01078M, 01022M, 02080, 02080DI (
https://www.acurite.com/shop-all-acurite/environments/weather-stations/weather-stations.html?ref=nav).
Any thoughts and suggestions would be very welcome. Thank you.