Rainfall estimates from opportunistic sensors in Germany across spatio-temporal scales

Study region: The study region is Germany and two sub-regions in Germany, i.e. the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and the city of Reutlingen. Study focus: Opportunistic rainfall sensors, namely personal weather stations and commercial microwave links, together with rain gauge data from the German Weather Service, were used in different combinations to derive rainfall maps with a geostatistical interpolation framework for Germany. This kriging type framework considered the uncertainty of opportunistic sensors and the line structure of commercial microwave links. The resulting rainfall maps were compared to two gauge-adjusted radar products and evaluated to three reference gauge datasets in the respective study regions on both daily and hourly basis. New Hydrological Insights for the Region: The interpolated rainfall products from opportunistic sensors provided good agreement to the reference rain gauges. The dataset combinations including information from the opportunistic sensors performed best. The addition of rain gauges from the German Weather Service did not consistently lead to an improvement of the interpolated rainfall maps. On the country-wide, daily scale the interpolated rainfall maps performed well, but the gauge-adjusted radar products were closer to the reference. For the regional and local scale in Rhineland-Palatinate and Reutlingen with an hourly resolution, the interpolated rainfall maps outperformed the interpolated product from DWD rain gauges and showed a similar agreement to the reference as the radar products

Rainfall estimates from opportunistic sensors in Germany across spatio-temporal scales

Study region: The study region is Germany and two sub-regions in Germany, i.e. the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and the city of Reutlingen.Study focus: Opportunistic rainfall sensors, namely personal weather stations and commercial microwave links, together with rain gauge data from the German Weather Service, were used in different combinations to derive rainfall maps with a geostatistical interpolation framework for Germany. This kriging type framework considered the uncertainty of opportunistic sensors and the line structure of commercial microwave links. The resulting rainfall maps were compared to two gauge-adjusted radar products and evaluated to three reference gauge datasets in the respective study regions on both daily and hourly basis.New Hydrological Insights for the Region: The interpolated rainfall products from opportunistic sensors provided good agreement to the reference rain gauges. The dataset combinations including information from the opportunistic sensors performed best. The addition of rain gauges from the German Weather Service did not consistently lead to an improvement of the interpolated rainfall maps. On the country-wide, daily scale the interpolated rainfall maps performed well, but the gauge-adjusted radar products were closer to the reference. For the regional and local scale in Rhineland-Palatinate and Reutlingen with an hourly resolution, the interpolated rainfall maps outperformed the interpolated product from DWD rain gauges and showed a similar agreement to the reference as the radar products

Mobile measurement techniques for local and micro-scale studies in urban and topo-climatology

Technical development during the last two decades has brought new potential and new applications for ­mobile measurements. In this paper, we present six case studies where mobile measurement devices were used to acquire data for meteorological and climatological research. Three case studies deal with ground-based mobile measurements – on buses for urban climate measurements and on a vessel on a lake – and three with airborne platforms – on a cable car and on an unmanned aerial vehicle for vertical soundings and on a tethered balloon sonde for cloud physics. For each study, we describe the measurement set-up and address the potential and drawbacks of these applications. At the end, we discuss general aspects related to mobile observations especially concerning the time and space dimension of measurements