International Conference on Opportunistic Sensing of Precipitation - OpenSense

A toolbox for real time data acquisition and quality control of personal weather station rainfall data

Jun 25, 2025, 3:15 PM

1h 15m

German Weather Service, Offenbach, Germany

Poster OS data acquisition, management & standardization Coffee Poster Session Tuesday

Speakers

Nathalie Rombeek (Department of Water Management, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands) Jochen Seidel (Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems, University of Stuttgart, Germany) Georges Schutz (RTC4Water s.à.r.l., Roeser, Luxembourg)

Description

The high network density of personal weather stations (PWSs), often exceeding that of official weather stations from national meteorological agencies, offers a large potential to improve precipitation estimates. Another advantage is that PWSs have a high temporal resolution ($\sim$5~min), are available in (near) real-time and can potentially be used for now-casting, flood forecasting or early warning system. For such purposes the latency and quality of the data are important aspects to consider.
We explored the real-time potential of rainfall data from PWSs from the private company Netatmo, which can be accessed via an application programming interface (API). We analysed the real-time accessibility and latency of the data and developed concepts of how existing quality control algorithms can be applied in the context of real-time applications. First results of these analyses and a road map for implementing this as a software package are presented.