International Conference on Opportunistic Sensing of Precipitation - OpenSense

Session

Oral session #5

Jun 26, 2025, 4:30 PM

Conveners

Oral session #5: Application of OS rainfall data

• Martin Fencl (Czech Technical University in Prague)

29. Applications of opportunistic rainfall observations: a review

Jonas Olsson (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute)

6/26/25, 4:30 PM

Application of OS rainfall data

Oral

Accurate rainfall observations, particularly with a high resolution in space and time. are of paramount societal importance for several reasons. They are needed to derive statistics of rainfall extremes used for planning and designing infrastructure. They are used to establish the best possible initial state for subsequent weather forecasts and rainfall nowcasts. They are crucial for...

15. Precipitation field reconstruction and tracking using opportunistic rain sensors: the Summer 2021 catastrophic event in Germany as a case study

Filippo Giannetti (University of Pisa)

6/26/25, 4:45 PM

Application of OS rainfall data

Oral

Quantitative precipitation estimates are usually derived based on the measurements collected by professional instruments, such as weather stations, weather radars, disdrometers, and rain gauges, with different time/space resolutions, and accuracies.
Recently, the opportunistic use of pre-existing microwave communication links has been investigated to retrieve precipitation estimates. In...

13. Exploiting a dense Commercial Microwave Link (CML) network in Nigeria for high-resolution near-surface rainfall estimates

Bas Walraven (Delft University of Technology)

6/26/25, 5:00 PM

Application of OS rainfall data

Oral

High-resolution rainfall data, in both space and time, is essential for a number of life sustaining (hydrological) applications, ranging from flood early warning to (small-holder) agricultural services. Interpolated rainfall maps based on path-averaged rainfall estimates from Commercial Microwave Links (CMLs) present a viable alternative for near-surface high-resolution gridded rainfall data...

45. Runoff predictions in combined sewer system of the city of Prague using raw attenuation data from commercial microwave links

Ying Song

6/26/25, 5:15 PM

Application of OS rainfall data

Oral

Commercial microwave links (CMLs) have recently shown great potential in urban drainage modelling due to their ability to provide rainfall-runoff dynamics. Previous studies typically used mechanistic hydrodynamic models driven by quantitative precipitation estimates (QPEs) derived from CML attenuation data. Naturally, some errors are introduced, primarily related to CML rainfall retrieval...

38. Large-scale hydrological modelling with CML rainfall data

Andrijana Todorovic (University of Belgrade, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Institute for Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering)

6/26/25, 5:30 PM

Application of OS rainfall data

Oral

Accurate spatio-temporal representation of rainfall is essential for hydrological (i.e., rainfall-runoff) modelling, and for the later applications of hydrological models. Rainfall data are usually obtained from official raingauge networks; however, these networks are often sparce and/or even with declining number of stations. To improve spatio-temporal representation of rainfall, various...

36. Flood forecasting based on personal weather station rainfall data

Claudia Brauer (Wageningen University)

6/26/25, 5:45 PM

Application of OS rainfall data

Oral

An increasing number of personal weather stations (PWSs) is installed by citizens, resulting in a large amount of real-time available precipitation data. This study assesses the applicability of these data for flood forecasting. We focussed on 30 catchments (total area 2474 km2) located in the management area of Water Board Rijn and IJssel, a water authority in the Netherlands which actually...