Crowdsourcing: a sustainable solution for monitoring weather and climate in urban areas?

"In the next century, planet Earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. These will probe and monitor cities, the atmosphere, highways, conversations, our bodies, even our dreams." Neil Gross (1999)
With over 50% of the world’s population now living in cities, it is now essential to better understand atmospheric processes and impacts in urban areas and how they will be affected by climate change. This can only be achieved by making more meteorological observations in our cities to improve our understanding. However, national networks have limited instrumentation in urban areas, simply because they are considered unrepresentative of the broader, regional climate. As a result, many cities only have one or two weather stations and this is not sufficient to resolve the mosaic of microclimates and associated vulnerabilities experienced in urban areas. High resolution data is needed to improve hazard warning systems, flood-water and urban drainage management and urban heat island monitoring (especially important during heatwave events). To this end, some cities have implemented dense urban meteorological networks to resolve the urban climate. However, due to significant associated running costs, few have lasted past the demonstration phase to become genuine monitoring networks.
Although standard measurements have so far failed to provide the high resolution data the scientific community require, non-standard data is now being ubiquitously generated by a wide-range of sources (e.g. smart phones, vehicles, infrastructure, citizens) and there is much potential to ’crowdsource’ this data to be utilised for the benefit of urban climatology and associated end-users. The difficulty is that such crowdsourced data is rarely quality assured / quality controlled which presently limits its broader utility. Hence, this project will use new state of the art calibration facilities at UoB and an existing urban meteorological network as a testbed to assess the availability, application, and more importantly the quality and value of a range of crowdsourced weather and climate-related data for the benefit of science and society in a typical mid-latitude city.