As the challenges of climate change increase, the need for high-resolution data in space and time to better understand climate impacts is also increasing. Today there exist new ways of collecting weather data, for example personal weather stations. The stations provide information about temperature, air pressure, humidity and geographical location. Other sources of information include telecommunication tower networks which can be used to derive rainfall data. Novel data sources also include the internet of things (IoT) and crowdsourced information. There is a continuous growth in data from high-frequency, diverse, unmanaged sources.
Within the framework of the I-CHANGE project, several Living Laboratories (LLs) started the activity of implementing observational systems mostly run by citizens to look at the challenges that the future has in store. Each LL is looking into risks connected to climate change like heavy rain event, land slides, flooding, among others. We show in Figure 1 an overview of the LL’s observational activities that are already active or currently in the start-up phase. This allows us to prepare the ingestion of the data into new data pipelines.
Fig. 1: Overview of Living Lab’s (LL) activities in the I-CHANGE project. The I-CHANGE LL’s are: WUR in Amsterdam, BCNLL in Barcelona, BOLL in Bologna, UCD in Dublin, GOALL in Genoa, UHASSELT in Hasselt, TAU in Jerusalem, and LLWA in Ouagadougou, West Africa.
By ECMWF, Ulrike Falk, Simon Smart, Fredrik Wetterhall