Assessing the Quality of Non-Professional Meteorological Data for Operational Purposes

Abstract

Non-professional weather stations are often omitted from the networks of standard/professional stations at various spatial scales. Nevertheless, there are many tasks when such non-professional datasets can serve as the only or the most relevant available source respectively. Its acquisition costs, sufficient quality and capacity together with its moveability represent properties that should be taken into consideration when planning operational usage of various meteorological data. In this paper, we focus on the datasets of air temperatures and relative humidities measured both with professional and nonprofessional devices at nearly the same location. Four years of almost continual measurements (2016-2019) ensure robust sample of mutual comparison, which we analyze in the paper more in detail in order to assess the potential of non-professional datasets for utilization in aviation meteorology. Particular issues such as value difference patterns, large errors occurrence, temporal signal stability and seasonality are elaborated as well.