Smartphones, tablets help UW researchers improve storm forecasts
The next advance in weather forecasting may not come from a new satellite or supercomputer, but from a device in your pocket. University of Washington atmospheric scientists are using pressure sensors included in the newest smartphones to develop better weather forecasting techniques.
“With this approach we could potentially have tens or hundreds of thousands of additional surface pressure observations, which could significantly improve short-term weather forecasts,” said Cliff Mass, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences.
PressureNet is a free app for Android devices that contain pressure sensors.
Owners of certain new Android smartphones and tablet computers can now download the PressureNet app, which measures atmospheric pressure and provides the data to UW researchers.
When some smartphone manufacturers recently added pressure sensors, to estimate the phone’s elevation and help pinpoint its location, Mass saw an opportunity to enhance weather prediction. In the autumn he approached Cumulonimbus, a Canadian app company that developed a barometer application for smartphones that collects all the data and shares it back with users.
The PressureNet app this week collected about 4,000 observations per hour, with users clustered in the northeastern United States and around some major cities.
“We need more density,” Mass said. “Right now it’s a matter of getting more people to contribute.”
Android devices equipped with pressure sensors include Samsung’s Galaxy S3, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note and Nexus 4 smartphones, and the Nexus 10 and Motorola Xoom tablet computers.
Atmospheric pressure is the weight of the air above, and includes information about what is happening as air masses collide. Precise tracking of pressure readings and pressure changes could help weather forecasters to pinpoint exactly where and when a major storm will strike.
Mass is particularly interested in the center of the country, which is prone to severe storms but includes fewer weather observation stations.
“Thunderstorms are one of the areas of weakest skill for forecasting,” Mass said. “I think thunderstorms in the middle part of the country could potentially be the biggest positive for this approach. They are relatively small-scale, they develop over a few hours, they can be severe and can affect people significantly.”
Tracking storms a few hours out could help people better protect themselves and their property. In the Seattle area, the tool could improve short-term forecasts for wind and rain.
“I think this could be one of the next major revolutions in weather forecasting, really enhancing our ability to forecast at zero to four hours,” Mass said.
UW researchers are the first scientists to have access to the smartphone pressure data. They are plotting the observations and preparing them for use in weather-prediction models.
Cumulonimbus updated the app’s privacy settings last week so users could allow access to the data by scientific researchers. Since then, the UW group has been uploading the pressure data each hour and preparing it for use in weather forecasting models. The data will soon be available to all researchers who want to incorporate it in weather-prediction tools.
A project begun in 2010 by Mass and Gregory Hakim, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences, has explored ways to improve weather forecasts by taking advantage of surface pressure measurements. The current network of U.S. weather stations offers about one thousand air-pressure readings. Adding observations collected by small-scale weather networks and hobbyists, the UW team found, improves the forecasts. A weather station in every pocket would offer an unprecedented wealth of data.
A recent blog post by Mass explains more about the UW group’s approach. Luke Madaus, a UW graduate student in atmospheric sciences, will load the smartphone data into a weather-forecasting system. At first the tool will use only stationary data points, but eventually it may include data from devices in motion.
Building the system will take a few months, Mass said. By this summer’s thunderstorm season he hopes the UW team will be using smartphone data to forecast storms and compare their results against traditional forecasts.
If the technique is successful, the researchers hope to supply it to the National Weather Service and the weather bureaus of other countries.
The technique could be particularly useful, Mass noted, in countries that have little weather-forecasting infrastructure but where smartphones are becoming more common.
The research has been funded by Microsoft Corp. and the National Weather Service.
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For more information, contact Mass at 206-685-0910 or cliff@atmos.washington.edu.
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I’ve used this app, and it works reasonably well, though is beholden to the whim of the user, so sometimes you’ll see a location you are monitoring drop out if the user leaves the cloud or turns off the device. – Anthony
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Wouldn’t the accuracy of these figures be influenced by people riding up and down in lifts, especially in tall buildings?
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Depends what altitude the GPS returns. That way you cancel out your height.
That leaves the question of inaccuracy in you sensor. Here you cross check against know accurate sources that are near, or other phones that are near.
I think this is really quite a good project. Only by doing it for real will you get to see if there are errors.
Even if there are calibration errors, a lot of what you are after is change of pressure over time, and for those, calibration errors get canceled out.
(t1+e) – (t2+e) = t1-t1. No such error in the result
I’m skeptical of this for many of the reasons already mentioned. Vertical displacement in buildings is problematic – if you’re inside, you probably won’t get a good GPS fix to determine altitude. GPS accuracy in the vertical is not as good as horizontal anyway, but it’s more critical to get the altitude correct as it will have the strongest effect on pressure.
Download an app to turn on and display your phone’s GPS and watch that altitude vary by 50 feet or more even when stationary.
Even with all the drawbacks, the system is a set in the right direction. I was surprised to read that there are only 1000 pressure sensing station in CONUS.
This is a wonderful idea.Repeatedly the short term forecasts in Sydney are wrong. In the old days you could look up a weather map with barometric pressures and lows marked and work out for yourself if there were a stable low off Sydney.This plus a look at the sky was as good as any forecast.
“Precise tracking of pressure readings and pressure changes could help weather forecasters to pinpoint exactly where and when a major storm will strike.”
Pinpoint ??? I don’t see how it would tell you any more than what radar and satellite data already tell us. And what good is knowing EXACTLY where a major storm will hit? Close only counts with hand grenades. Hurricanes pretty well pretty well screw everybody. If a hurricane is going to strike ten miles up the coast, instead of twenty, do you prepare differently?
This application should be quite useful for people (like myself) who suffer from barometric pressure headaches- being able to predict pressure drops will help one to prepare for them.
I fly gliders. There are already difficulties in using a mobile because of accessing far too many cells at one time. I am interested in the pressure sensor as it could be used in a flight-direction app, but I fear any pressure data contributed to this system may be misleading. I hope they have an anomaly-trap built in.
Gene Selkov says:
I totally agree with this. Each cell tower should have, as part of the main package, a complete weather station. They’re already connected for sending their data, every minute from every cell tower would be a WEALTH of information. They are fixed, with known altitude and geolocation. And most cell towers I’ve seen are more isolated than most USHCN stations, usually in a grassy isolated fenced area in residential suburbs. Heck, throw in a camera or four and you’re laughing!
Imagine the usefulness if weather models could start with thousands of real-time weather sensors.
Already we have highway cams all up and down the main highways with elementary weather stations, I check them every time I’m about to go for a long drive, especially in winter, and most cities have their traffic cams and intersection cams available online.
Those of us with Smartphones (I have a Galaxy Nexus, btw, but the PressureNet app says I don’t have a pressure sensor) have more computer power in our phones than a high end PC did just a few years ago. It makes sense to find ways to harness the potential of all that mobile, GPS’d computer power. It would also be trivial to compare pressure readings from mobile devices with the static reading from the cell tower when they’re close, to map out the accuracy of the device.
I think it’s a solution looking for the right problem… but I like seeing people thinking about this.
Most people live in cities.More DATA Corrupted by Urban Heat Island.