Calibration of Crowdsourced Pressure Observations

Crowdsourced weather observations offer the potential for greatly improving the density of pressure observations over the U.S. and other regions of the globe, and thus enhancing regional numerical weather prediction (NWP). This talk will describe a NOAA-funded project to collect surface pressure observations from smartphones, air quality networks (e.g., PurpleAir), and non-standard observational networks (e.g., Tempest) and to calibrate/bias correct these observations before use in NWP. Roughly 50,000 observations per hour are now being collected over the U.S. from these non-standard sources. This talk will describe the collected networks, evaluate their calibration, and describe their temporal and spatial coverage. Finally, the talk will review the effort to pass these observations to NOAA for test periods using the RRFS rapid-refresh modeling system.