Automatic processing, quality assurance and serving of real-time weather data

Matthew Williams, Dan Cornford, Lucy Bastin, Richard Jones, Stephen Parker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Recent advances in technology have produced a significant increase in the availability of free sensor data over the Internet. With affordable weather monitoring stations now available to individual meteorology enthusiasts a reservoir of real time data such as temperature, rainfall and wind speed can now be obtained for most of the United States and Europe. Despite the abundance of available data, obtaining useable information about the weather in your local neighbourhood requires complex processing that poses several challenges. This paper discusses a collection of technologies and applications that harvest, refine and process this data, culminating in information that has been tailored toward the user. In this case we are particularly interested in allowing a user to make direct queries about the weather at any location, even when this is not directly instrumented, using interpolation methods. We also consider how the uncertainty that the interpolation introduces can then be communicated to the user of the system, using UncertML, a developing standard for uncertainty representation.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)353-362
Number of pages10
JournalComputers and Geosciences
Volume37
Issue number3
Early online date13 Oct 2010
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2011

Bibliographical note

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Computers and Geosciences. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Williams, M, Cornford, D, Bastin, L, Jones, R & Parker, S, 'Automatic processing, quality assurance and serving of real-time weather data' Computers and geosciences, vol. 37, no. 3 (2011) DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2010.05.010

Keywords

  • user-contributed data
  • UncertML
  • INTAMAP
  • data quality
  • interpolation

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