Delft Measures Rain: A quality assessment of precipitation measurements from personal weather stations

Personal weather station (PWS) networks have the potential to supply precipitation data at high spatial and temporal resolution for urban hydrological modeling. Past research has shown promising results on the quality of PWS data, for example from Netatmo gauges, but studies on other PWS brands are limited. This thesis assesses the quality of...

A new Framework for assessing “The Value” of an Amateur Weather Station: Enabled by Web bots

A personal weather station (PWS) is a set of weather measuring instruments that is owned and operated by an individual, club, association, or business. Even tho these stations might be less advanced as the professional stations, the amount of amateur stations that are active is much higher. With these PWS networks in full effect and still...

Maximum Coverage Problems: Theory and Application in Optimal Sensor Selection

In this thesis we analyse the class of <i>maximum coverage</i> problems. For all discussed problems, linear programs are formulated. Using the notion of <i>submodularity</i>, we prove that for the weighted version of the basic <i>Maximum Coverage</i> problem, where the weights differ per set, a polynomial-time greedy algorithm guarantees a (1 -...

Solar Powered Weather Station: Sensors and Control

Increasing concerns surrounding the influence of urban climate on the livability of cities and the health of citizens lead to a need for environmental data on a more localized scale. Self-powered weather stations that use the many WiFi networks spanning the city to transmit their data are a promising solution to increase the amount of data on...

Quality control and bias adjustment of crowdsourced wind speed observations

Wind observations collected at citizen weather stations (CWSs) could be an invaluable resource in climate and meteorology studies, yet these observations are underutilised because scientists do not have confidence in their quality. These wind speed observations have systematic biases, likely caused by improper instrumentation and station...

Improving location accuracy of a crowdsourced weather station by using a point cloud: Use case based Netatmo on the Hague

The world’s continuously increasing population leads to environmental challenges, among which, the urban heat island effect has been recognized as one of the leading environmental issues recently. Using traditional weather station (usually one or two within one city and placed in rural area) to monitor and model the canopy layer urban heat...

The Potential of Citizen Observatories for Improving Spatial Measurements of Rainfall in Cities

Urban pluvial flooding occurs when the run-off converted rainfall exceeds the capacity of the sewer or stormwater system (Houston et al., 2011). This can result in damage to ecology, infrastructure, disruption to human activities, injuries and in the worst-case scenario, loss of life (Biniyam et al., 2017). With the expected increase in the...

Automated quality-control filters for undetected rainfall in citizen rain gauge data

Flooding in cities, known as Urban Pluvial Flooding (UPF), causes disruption of society, damage to cities and inconvenience for people. Cities are expected to become more vulnerable to UPF due to more frequent and more intense extreme rainfall events with high spatial variability as result of climate change. Additionally increasing urbanisation...

Development of a modular weather station

The TransAfrican Hydro Meteorological Observatory aims to create a dense weather station network in sub-Sahara Africa in order to obtain accurate climate data for a wide range of applications. Existing high-quality weather stations are very expensive and unaffordable for the African government or private parties. Therefore innovative sensors and...

A low-cost weather station

A network of tens of thousands of low-budget weather stations will give people of Africa more certainty about weather and water. The project was launched this summer in Kenya.

Dissemination of ERS-a low bitrate data and the use od L-band receiving stations

The dissemination of ERS-1 real-time thematic products via the Global Telecommunication System, the ECS satellite telecom system or the Eiuronet packet switching network is analysed and evaluated against the use of direct-receive L-band stations as used for NOAA weather image reception.