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.

Can meteorological model forecasts initialize hydrological simulations rather than observed data in ungauged basins?

“…Weather data inside and nearby the three SOL catchments were collected from ARPA Lombardy, and, since spring 2013, meteorological information was also acquired from the MNW association, which has an open‐source database fed by citizen scientists. A comprehensive review about this amateur weather network can be found in Giazzi et al (2022). In Table 1, the total number of stations per variable is shown.…”

The role of citizen science to assess the spatiotemporal pattern of rainfall events in urban areas: a case study in the city of Genoa, Italy

“…When focusing on the ground effects, different weather stations, belonging either to authoritative or citizen science networks can be considered for the Genoa city centre area (Figure 10): 3 stations managed by Arpal (AR-1, AR-2 and AR3), as well as several citizen science stations (CS hereafter) provided by Acronet network (Fedi et al , 2013), Meteonetwork (Giazzi et al , 2022) and Wunderground (Gharesifard et al , 2017) providing a high-density coverage of the historical city center of Genoa (stations CS-0 to CS-5).…”

WRF data assimilation of weather stations and lightning data for a convective event in northern Italy

“…The input data from meteorological weather stations comes from two major Italian citizenscience networks, namely Meteonetwork (MNW) and Centro Meteo Lombardo (CML). MNW is a non-profit organization with the task to "promote and disseminate for the benefit of the community the knowledge of meteorological, climatological, environmental, hydrological and glaciological sciences, and their multiple expressions on the territory" (Giazzi et al 2022).…”

“…Both citizen-science networks perform a quality check before the data release, in order to avoid missing or anomalous data. These checks include range tests, to exclude values out of the normal range of that particular variable, and cross-validation checks, to exclude anomalous values with respect to the nearby stations (Giazzi et al 2022). In addition, a further check is conducted by the WRF data assimilation (WRFDA) software algorithms, since the absorption of the observations is possible only if the difference between the background model field and the observation value is smaller than a predefined threshold.…”

“…The latest advances in the real-time availability of observation data from different sources (meteorological weather station, satellite measurements, radar data, lightning data, crowd-sourced observations) are opening new possibilities for data assimilation in limitedarea weather models (Giazzi et al 2022, Hintz et al 2021.…”