An increasing number of urban meteorological networks (UMNs) and automated data acquisition are irreplaceable tools in modern urban climate monitoring, evaluation, and analysis. The most serious issue in such systems is data loss, caused primarily by communication problems between stations and servers. The Novi Sad Urban Network (NSUNET) consists of 28 remote stations and 2 servers built solely on open-source technologies. It is used for monitoring climate peculiarities and acquiring long-term meteorological data from the urban area of Novi Sad, as well as for the early warning notification to the city emergency services of the current urban weather conditions. Since its deployment, the system has managed to overcome most of the problems related to today's UMNs, to operate at a low Internet service fee, and ensure high reliability and performance on low-budget hardware. This study includes details on how to develop such a system and it presents a statistical analysis of the NSUNET system's performances and the measurement data. Furthermore, this kind of monitoring system provides good results in the analysis of air/surface temperature and outdoor human thermal comfort in the local climate zones (LCZs) of urban and surrounding areas and can help identify hot spots/districts in the urban area.
Keywords: Cost-effective network; NSUNET system; Novi Sad (Serbia); Open-source technologies; Urban monitoring network; Wireless sensor network.