Ulrike Falk has recently joined ECMWF to work on the iCHANGE project
The I-CHANGE project is centred on the hypothesis that empowering citizen science initiatives forms the basis for impactful behavioural changes and will lead to and facilitate mitigation efforts in response to climate change. A core task of the I-CHANGE project is building the Environmental Impact Hub (EIH). The EIH is envisioned as a central hub of data, tools and apps developed by I-CHANGE project partners using a multidisciplinary and participatory approach that allows for data mining of the “Internet of Things” (IoT). The hub will contain all the citizen observations collected during the project in the Citizen Observation Archive and will serve them to all the other applications in the project. Developing and implementing the observation-related infrastructure, i.e. the Citizen Observation Archive and the upstream Quality Assessment and Data Processing, is ECMWF’s major contribution to the project.
One of these initiatives is to engage citizens in the active collection of hydrometeorological and other data in open innovation ecosystems in real-life environments, the so-called Living Labs. A number of these Living Labs are directly involved in setting up the envisioned data infrastructure to facilitate the assimilation and distribution of datasets to the general public. Project experts are tasked with the development of tools for increasing data usability and interoperability.
Our new project member at ECMWF, Ulrike Falk, has commenced her work on the development and implementation of the I-CHANGE Environmental Impact Hub lead by Simon Smart and Fredrik Wetterhall. First steps include quality assessment of sample data from selected Living Labs, and planning the implementation of EIH components within ECMWF’s existing data ecosystem. Quality analysis and filtering of unconventional observations from the I-CHANGE Living Labs has begun!

Flow chart I-CHANGE WP4 Environmental Impact Hub