I can’t imagine why this project exists. We have thousands of weather stations across the world already. Disentangling the temperature of your pocket from the actual temperature seems like an exercise in futility to me. Even the authors claim they can only get within 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, so what is the point of having this inaccurate data?
From the American Geophysical Union
Crowdsourcing weather using smartphone batteries
WASHINGTON, DC — Smartphones are a great way to check in on the latest weather predictions, but new research aims to use the batteries in those same smartphones to predict the weather.
A group of smartphone app developers and weather experts discovered a way to use the temperature sensors built into smartphone batteries to crowdsource weather information. These tiny thermometers usually prevent smartphones from dangerously overheating, but the researchers discovered the battery temperatures tell a story about the environment around them.
Crowdsourcing hundreds of thousands of smartphone temperature readings from phones running the popular OpenSignal Android app, the team estimated daily average temperatures for eight major cities around the world. After calibration, the team calculated air temperatures within an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of the actual value, which should improve as more users join the system.
While each of the cities already has established weather stations, according to the new method’s creators it could one day make predictions possible at a much finer scale of time and space than is currently feasible. Whereas today, weather reports typically provide one temperature for an entire city and a handful of readings expected throughout a day, the technique could lead to continuously updated weather predictions at a city block resolution.
“The ultimate end is to be able to do things we’ve never been able to do before in meteorology and give those really short-term and localized predictions,” said James Robinson, co-founder of London-based app developer OpenSignal that discovered the method. “In London you can go from bright and sunny to cloudy in just a matter of minutes. We’d hope someone would be able to decide when to leave their office to get the best weather for their lunch break.”
The work was published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Smartphone sensors
Robinson’s OpenSignal app collects information voluntarily sent from users’ phones to build accurate maps of cellphone coverage and Wi-Fi access points. The app boasts about 700,000 active users according to Robinson, about 90 percent of which opt in to providing statistics collected by their phones.
Robinson originally wondered whether smartphones running on newer, 4G networks ran hotter than those running on older networks. When no difference showed up, he looked for other potential uses of the temperature information available on Android-powered devices.
“Just sort of for fun we started looking to see if there was a correlation with anything else,” said Robinson. “We got some London weather data for comparison and found the two sets of temperatures were offset, but they had the same sort of shape.”
While OpenSignal is available to iPhone and iPad users, the temperature readings on those devices are not accessible like on their Android counterparts.
Cellphone thermometers
After finding the correlation between smartphone and air temperatures in London, Robinson and his fellow developers assembled temperature data from other major cities where they had a large number of users. Comparing data from Los Angeles, Paris, Mexico City, Moscow, Rome, San Paulo and Buenos Aires, Argentina, they saw the same link between the two sets of temperatures they saw in London.
“It was amazing how easily the correlation sort of popped out,” said Robinson. “We didn’t do any handpicking of data—it sort of just emerged.”
A smartphone’s environment affects its temperature, according to Robinson. On a sweltering day, a cell phone tucked in a pocket will be hotter than the same cell phone on an icy day. Weather experts helped Robinson develop a way to calculate outdoor temperatures from smartphone battery temperatures, the latter of which are typically hotter.
However, other factors unrelated to the outdoor weather can play a role. A phone outdoors running the latest 3-D game could run at 46 degrees Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit) while the same phone idling in an air-conditioned building nearby could be only running at 27 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit).
To avoid fluctuations in temperature unrelated to the real outdoor temperature, Robinson needed large amounts of data. While an individual phone might not provide an accurate representation of the weather, combining the readings from hundreds or thousands of phones together gives a more truthful overall picture. Currently Robinson collects over half a million temperature readings each day from users of his OpenWeather app. He said he plans to make the data freely available to academic researchers.
“There’s the wider promise when logging all this information that there will be something really interesting you can understand,” said Robinson. “The most obvious application is climate and weather tracking.”
Personal weather predictions
Currently weather tracking primarily takes place at weather stations, such as those at airports. However, weather stations provide only one point of reference and are rare outside of densely populated areas, forcing weather forecasters to fill in the gaps when making their predictions, reducing both accuracy and how specific an area they can make predictions for.
While Robinson says his multitude of mobile phones can provide large amounts of data, individual areas still need to be fine-tuned using existing weather stations before the incoming information can be usable for weather prediction.
“The challenge is whether we can take this technique and use it in places where we don’t already have reliable weather information to retune the model,” said Robinson. “That’s something we’re still working on.”
Robinson says some recent smartphones come with built-in sensors specifically built to measure the environment around them such as air temperature, humidity and pressure. To take advantage of these features, Robinson and his fellow developers released WeatherSignal, an app built around mobile weather watching.
As these features become commonplace in the smartphone market, Robinson foresees smartphones becoming an important tool in weather monitoring.
Notes for Journalists
Journalists and public information officers (PIOs) of educational and scientific institutions who have registered with AGU can download a PDF copy of this early view article by clicking on this link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50786/abstract
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Something tells me this is ultimately funded by the government.
davidmhoffer: Last point as I think we will disagree and as I set the conversation you are welcome to finish it.
If the old shepherd who has worked the field for 50 years says “that sky means a cold night” and he says he knows because his father told him who learnt from his father who worked the same hillside and so on…
Would you go “pah, superstition”?
Well, this will give you that experience in lot shorter time. A thousand different shepherds every second of every day for every field.
This idea will have a chance of working.
But if you drop your cell-phone off the side of a cruise ship, will it report Trenberth’s missing heat on it’s way down into the abyss?
The collected data has to be cleaned up before it can be used. That is done according to a rule set. Ask yourself who makes the rules? Do you trust them? Do you have reason to trust them? So far nobody entrusted with making the rules is above scorn because there is too much grant money at stake for getting it wrong (wrong being out of line with the political agenda. Ask Bob Carter.)
Sparks says:
August 13, 2013 at 1:03 pm
Why are posts being lost? this is about the 5th time in so many weeks. It says “sorry this comment cannot be posted”.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Try hitting the refresh button (It worked for me)
Wonderful example of Post Modern Science.
The variables are uncontrolled, the possibilities for error enormous and mostly biassed toward indicating warmer environs, the data must be corrected by values often exceeding those measured and so forth.
But thats all good as the conclusions are preordained, right.
As data points increase, the conclusion most likely to arise, is that most cell phone users, prefer climate controlled environs.Live in cities and do not get out into a natural environment very often.
Further and using the same methodology, if we protect the lazy and clueless we will have more of them each year.Or that parasites do not voluntarily leave a healthy host.
When will the scientific method come back into fashion?
M Courtney says: @ur momisugly August 13, 2013 at 1:52 pm
…. If the old shepherd who has worked the field for 50 years says “that sky means a cold night” and he says he knows because his father told him who learnt from his father who worked the same hillside and so on…
Would you go “pah, superstition”?
Well, this will give you that experience in lot shorter time. A thousand different shepherds every second of every day for every field.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Let me ask you this question.
How often is your cell phone sitting where it is not in close proximity to your body, shaded from the sun and in the open air outside (and not in a car)?
I work outside doing children’s entertainment or farm work and my phone is either in a pocket (mostly soaked in sweat or under a coat) or in my purse locked in a hot black truck or in an A/C house.
I skimmed throuhg the comments and did not see anyone mention this. I wonder if they mean “pressure” rather than “temperature”. I saw a piece on crowdsourcing pressure from smart phones. Then when violent weather, like thunderstroms or tornadoes occurs, there is a much finer network of pressure measurements, which could be extremely useful in analysing what is happening.
What someone needs to do is take a recording thermometer and dump it into a pocket or a phone case and run the experiment to determine how far off these temperatures are compared to a home type weather station. (I don’t have access to the correct type of thermometer and don’t know where to get one.)
Perhaps someone with the money and time can run the experiment.
Here are a couple of the things that a phone app can’t handle, hence making this study unless.
1) If the person is indoors or outdoors? Rather important to know this.
2) How is the phone being held? Based on where the battery is in relationship to how the user holds the phone will influence body heat source.
Of course if they limit the study to only take samples when the phone is taking pictures and breaking the data into 2 groups based on if a flash was used they might be able to get some data.
It’s not just April the 1st. again. It’s Cloud Cuckoo Land.
From the article:
“While an individual phone might not provide an accurate representation of the weather, combining the readings from hundreds or thousands of phones together gives a more truthful overall picture.”
====================================================
Sez who? How do they know which ones are the accurate representation of the weather?
I suppose that if the GPS data sorts the phone data into those who are walking outdoors and the reading is warmer than usual due to most of the phones being in peoples’ pockets, they can conclude that it’s raining. But they could also look out the window.
If it’s just weather you’re after, just tie into all the TV stations across the region of interest. Better yet, look at live radar.
This is a Rube Goldberg device looking for something to do.
Be a fairly good way to tell how people are using their phones: how long they sit in air-conditioned rooms, how much time the phone spends in a pocket, how often they make calls, whether they’re keeping their house at a nearly-unheard-of 72° in Winter… all with a “weather” application. Neat.
“A group of smartphone app developers ***
said James Robinson, co-founder of London-based app developer OpenSignal that discovered the method [“METHOD”, LOL!] . ‘In London you can go from bright and sunny to cloudy in just a matter of minutes. We’d hope someone would be able to decide when to leave their office to get the best weather for their lunch break.'”
To echo for emphasis what has been said by other WUWT commenters above, THIS IS ALL AND ONLY ABOUT SELLING A PRODUCT (and, for socialists, about more potential government control via monitoring).
The “research” is not only applied research, but marketing-driven, end-result-driven, all the way. “How can we make some more money? Hm…. I KNOW! Let’s tell people they are saving the planet by buying our app!! haw, ha, ha, ha, haaaa……….. is that the bank up ahead? Turn left.”
One would HOPE someone bright enough to find his or her way to work in London would think to look out the window… .
I believe it is only judged to be valuable if the phone (phony) temperature is higher than normally measured.
Codetech: “Wouldn’t it make more sense to build a network to monitor the outdoor thermometers built into most cars?”
Good idea. I know the German weather bureau already do something similar with Lufthansa.
So …. the more feverish the CAGWer’s get the hotter Ma Gaea gets?
I sure hope Anthony doesn’t need to run around taking pictures of people’s cell phones to put the “debunk” on this. 😎
Given the location of most people’s cellphones, you could very well call this a “junk study”.
[rimshot]
M Courtney;
Would you go “pah, superstition”?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
No, because there may be a relationship that can be investigated and understood. But this idea is worse than superstition. It is taking data with inherent problems in it that are insurmountable and pretending that they aren’t.
I’ll give your dad the last word. Ask him. Seriously.
“Be sure to drink your Ovaltine… .”
WARNING: Matt Courtney do not watch this:
“The fate of the planet hung in the balance… .”
“Remember! [Gaiea] is depending on you!”
REPLACE above bad video link WITH (apologies!):
WARNING: Matt Courtney do not watch this
“The fate of the planet hung in the balance… .”
“Remember [Gaiea] is depending on you!”
We should start reporting a daily graph showing the max temp of the phones left inside the cars outdoors in the summer. Help pet owners and parents understand how hot the car gets, even with windows cracked.
Please forgive me. Wow. “This video does not exist” — TWICE. Well, it DOES exist (I was listening to it play on explorer while I posted the above comment. Sigh.
It’s the Christmas Story scene about the secret decoder ring where Ralphie is disillusioned. Just type “Christmas Story movie secret decoder ring” in the You Tube search box and it will come right up. I’m so sorry about those TWO bad links. I have NO IDEA what happened.
Using smartphones to collect temperature data is dumb; using them to collect pressure data is smart.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2013/02/smartphone-pressure-observations-take.html