International Conference on Opportunistic Sensing of Precipitation - OpenSense

Opportunistic rainfall observations in Gothenburg, Sweden: open data and real-time service

Jun 26, 2025, 3:15 PM

1h 15m

German Weather Service, Offenbach, Germany

Poster Application of OS rainfall data Coffee Poster Session Wednesday

Speaker

Remco van de Beek (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute)

Description

Gothenburg City is located on the west coast of Sweden, which is the most rainy region in the country. The city with surroundings has experienced several flood events over the years, with both pluvial, fluvial and coastal components. In order to minimize the risk of flooding as well risks of treatment plant overload and sewer overflow, the sewer network is equipped with a system for real-time control (digital twin) that allows diversion of flows as the situation requires. The urban basin feeding the central treatment plant is large and it takes up to 20 hours from rainfall at the edge of the basin to reach the plant, therefore accurate rainfall observations are crucial for predicting the inflow in the near future.

Currently, Gothenburg relies on one rainfall station in the national network and X municipal stations distributed over the city for rainfall observations with a high temporal resolution (1 min). This is not sufficient for fully capturing the spatial variability of localized cloudbursts, and in order to improve the situation different types of opportunistic rainfall observations have been investigated. Early tests with observations from Commercial Microwave Links (CML) some 10 years ago were promising, but it turned out difficult to set up an operational service. More recently, observations from Personal Weather Stations (PWS) in the city have been collected and investigated.

In this presentation we will share some experiences from the collaboration between a city (Gothenburg) and a national service (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute), on applying opportunistic rainfall observations in a hydrological context. In particular, a prototype of a real-time service delivering high-resolution rainfall based on integrated observations from official stations, PWS and weather radar will be described. Furthermore, the extended version of the OpenMRG data set, with open high-resolution rainfall observations from stations, CML and radar in Gothenburg, will be presented.