Crowdsourcing of weather observations at national meteorological and hydrological services in Europe

• Published in: Advances in science and research Vol. 15; pp. 71 - 76
• Main Authors: Krennert, Thomas, Pistotnik, Georg, Kaltenberger, Rainer, Csekits, Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Katlenburg-Lindau Copernicus GmbH 18-05-2018; Copernicus Publications
• Subjects: Analysis; Climatology; Crowdsourcing; Emergency warning programs; Ground truth; Hydrology; Observers; Quality management; Real time systems; Severe weather; Storms; Weather forecasting; Weather stations; Europe
• ISSN: 1992-0636; 1992-0628; 1992-0636
• DOI: 10.5194/asr-15-71-2018

National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) increase their
efforts to deliver impact-based weather forecasts and warnings. At the same
time, a desired increase in cost-efficiency prompts these services to
automatize their weather station networks and to reduce the number of human
observers, which leads to a lack of “ground truth” information about
weather phenomena and their impact. A possible alternative is to encourage
the general public to submit weather observations, which may include crucial
information especially in high-impact situations. We wish to provide an overview of the state and properties of existing
collaborations between NMHSs and voluntary weather observers or storm
spotters across Europe. For that purpose, we performed a survey among
30 European NMHSs, from which 22 NMHSs returned our questionnaire. This study
summarizes the most important findings and evaluates the use of
“crowdsourced” information. 86 % of the surveyed NMHSs utilize
information provided by the general public, 50 % have established official
collaborations with spotter groups, and 18 % have formalized them. The
observations are most commonly used for a real-time improvement of severe
weather warnings, their verification, and an establishment of a climatology
of severe weather events. The importance of these volunteered weather and impact observations has
strongly risen over the past decade. We expect that this trend will continue
and that storm spotters will become an essential part in severe weather
warning, like they have been for decades in the United States of America. A
rising number of incoming reports implies that quality management will
become an increasing issue, and we finally discuss an idea how to handle this challenge.