I am particularly taken by a new paper Aart Overeem and colleagues at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The group is doing some creative and hard thinking about what it would look like to turn your smartphone into a mobile weather station. In a recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, they used smartphone temperatures collected in several major cities and compared them to temperatures recorded by established weather stations. Many smartphones collect basic temperature data in order to prevent the phone from overheating.
They did some very clever math, such as correcting temperature to reflect that the phone is likely to be in your pocket and thus affected by your body heat. The validation is quite strong...in other words, this method works. It does have some interesting challenges (are you indoors, outdoors, or in your car?), but as with other crowdsourced projects, the beauty is in the sheer volume of data that can be collected.
If you are interested in adding your smartphone data to the global map, check out the program at WeatherSignal.
Overeem, A. et al. (In Press) Crowdsourcing urban air temperatures from smartphone battery temperatures. Geophysical Research Letters.
They did some very clever math, such as correcting temperature to reflect that the phone is likely to be in your pocket and thus affected by your body heat. The validation is quite strong...in other words, this method works. It does have some interesting challenges (are you indoors, outdoors, or in your car?), but as with other crowdsourced projects, the beauty is in the sheer volume of data that can be collected.
If you are interested in adding your smartphone data to the global map, check out the program at WeatherSignal.
Overeem, A. et al. (In Press) Crowdsourcing urban air temperatures from smartphone battery temperatures. Geophysical Research Letters.
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