Developments in the use of Crowd Sourced, Citizen Science and Opportunistic Data for Weather Observing

There has been considerable development in the use of crowd sourced and citizen science data to provide weather observations to the Met Office. The Weather Observations Website (wow.metoffice.gov.uk) has undergone major development, with a new version deployed in mid-2016.  The user experience has been significantly improved through adopting a ‘mobile first’ architecture and the site now allows the ingestion and extraction of observations through API technology.

One of the key use cases for WOW is that of operational meteorologists who are assessing the veracity of UK National Severe Weather Warnings (NSWWS) that deliver warnings of weather impacts as opposed to meteorological thresholds. These warnings have proved extremely beneficial, but a weakness has been in the lack of data to validate the warnings. WOW now contains an improved ability for anyone to quickly and easily provide an observation of a weather impact on a number of different types of infrastructure, and by a range of different weather types. This can also be supported by the submission of photographs which have proved very useful to the meteorologist on the bench. The Met Office has undertaken work to quality control these weather impact reports and are also engaging with citizen scientists providing observations to a partner organisation as a potential source of high quality weather impact reports which will benefit both organisations.

Studies are also ongoing into the collection of temperature data from vehicles, and are providing some promising results. With the use of a low cost interface device and a smartphone, a driver can send observations from their car into WOW which can then be stored, visualised and examined. In the future, these sources of data may well increase in importance as the requirements of Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP) for high resolution observational data become clear.

The use of opportunistic data is also being studied in some detail. In many cases, these data are generated as a by-product of another process and for a non-meteorological purpose however, when the data are examined, they provide information on the state of the atmosphere. An example of this is the Mode-S Enhanced Surveillance aircraft messages that are routinely transmitted and contain information on winds and temperatures. These can be intercepted by a simple and readily available antenna and offer benefits to both operational meteorologists and to NWP. The Met Office has installed a network of these antennas at the rainfall radar sites, which now provide around 5 million discrete observations per day.   Work continues to complete coverage of high altitude airspace across the UK.

While we, as meteorologists, consider that the value and benefits of our ‘traditional’ observing networks are well understood, it is significantly more challenging to assess the value and benefits of these types of crowd sourced, citizen science and opportunistic data. When assessing observations from home weather stations, for example, the error characteristics of the data are not well understood and so directly assimilating into NWP is difficult. This talk will explore some of the different approaches that can be taken to understanding the value of these data.