Meteonetwork: An Open Crowdsourced Weather Data System

Abstract

Citizen science has shown great potential for bringing large groups of people closer to science, thanks in part to cooperation with universities and research centers. In this context, amateur weather networks played a major role in the last few decades thanks to a constant growth in technology. An example is given by the Meteonetwork association, born in 2002, and mainly composed by atmospheric science enthusiasts, who built up in time a huge weather station network in Italy. In recent years, they have enlarged their horizons over Europe, displaying real time observations and daily maps coming from both personal weather stations and official networks. This study described how Meteonetwork has set up an open crowdsourced weather data system, how data are validated, and which products are generated and freely accessible for scientists and stakeholders for their own purposes. Two concrete use cases were described as examples: the Weatherness Project, which selects a subnet of Meteonetwork data for biometeorological and health purposes and the data assimilation process implemented to improve the initial conditions into the WRF meteorological model for daily weather forecasts.

Keywords

• citizen scientists
• weather data
• meteorological network
• climatological observations
• biometeorological indices
• WRF data assimilation