Crowdsourcing Observations with FMI Weather App

Citizen observations on weather provide valuable new sources of
information for weather services to improve their accurate warning
skill. Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) started a one-year pilot
project on crowdsourcing in summer 2017. The pilot project aims for
collecting observations of weather impacts both during summer (e.g.
disasters due to wind and thunderstorm, floods) and winter (e.g. ice on
roads). Observations are collected through a mobile app (iOS, Android)
which includes citizen weather observation functions. Users have the
option to view their own and other users’ observations on a map and
filter phenomena that they are interested in. Statistics are gathered
throughout this pilot project on the quality and quantity of citizen
weather observations. This data helps us to assess how viable these
observations are as a supplementary source of information alongside the
more traditional weather observations carried out by national
meteorological and hydrological services.

The project successfully demonstrate that there already is technical
ability to collect this kind of data, and more importantly, general
public is interested in to contribute into weather observations through
the app. The project has also demonstrated cases when observations of
citizens had a real impact on weather forecaster’s decision making on
launching a weather warning. In the presentation/poster we share our
thoughts on the successes of the project as well as discuss the
shortcomings.