User reports from the RMI smartphone app

Since August 2019, users of the RMI smartphone app are able to send an observation of the meteorological conditions at a certain place and a certain time. The observations provide information about the weather conditions and potentially severe weather to the other users and to RMI. The collection of citizen weather reports is a valuable complement to the information obtained with the classical instruments like stations, radar and satellite. The data can be exploited for nowcasting, warnings and model verification, and eventually in assimilation. A general introduction of the data and their characteristics can be found in Reyniers et al. (2023).



A basic quality control is implemented on the received observations via a plausibility check. This plausibility check determines whether an observation is plausible, suspicious or false, by comparing it to the INCA-BE nowcasting system using a simple thresholding scheme. INCA-BE is RMI's operational nowcasting system described in Reyniers et al. (2021).



There is no strict spatial extent since there is no restriction at the input side: users can send observations from all over the globe. The bulk of the observations are received from within Belgium. Note that the plausibility check is not available for reports from outside Belgium.

Simple

Date (Creation)
2019-08-01
Citation identifier
RMI-be / appobs
Status
On going
Point of contact
Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role

Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium

info@meteo.be

Point of contact

Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium

info@meteo.be

Owner

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

  • Atmospheric conditions
Keywords

  • federal government

  • crowdsourscing

  • citizen science

  • severe weather

  • natural risks

  • cloudiness

  • precipitation

  • hail

  • wind

  • wind gust

  • whirlwind

  • floods

  • snow

  • road conditions

  • fog

  • optical phenomena

Spatial scope
Access constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints
No limitations on public access
Use constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) This is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the license. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Scientific publications should refer to https://doi.org/10.5194/ecss2023-50
Classification
Unclassified
Spatial representation type
Vector
Language
English
Topic category
  • Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere
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thumbnail




Begin date
2019-08-01T00:00:00
Unique resource identifier
EPSG:4258
Distribution format
Name Version

CSV

1.0

GeoJSON

1.0

Digital transfer options

OnLine resource
Protocol Linkage Name

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

 		https://opendata.meteo.be

Digital transfer options

OnLine resource
Protocol Linkage Name
OGC:WMS-1.3.0-http-get-capabilities https://opendata.meteo.be/service/appobs/wms?service=WMS&version=1.3.0&request=getCapabilities

appobs:appobs

Digital transfer options

OnLine resource
Protocol Linkage Name
OGC:WFS-1.0.0-http-get-capabilities https://opendata.meteo.be/service/appobs/wfs?service=WFS&version=1.1.0&request=GetCapabilities

appobs:appobs

Digital transfer options

OnLine resource
Protocol Linkage Name

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

 		https://opendata.meteo.be/documentation/?dataset=appobs

Documentation

Digital transfer options

OnLine resource
Protocol Linkage Name

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

 		https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5798952

Digital transfer options

OnLine resource
Protocol Linkage Name

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

 		https://doi.org/10.5194/ecss2023-50
Hierarchy level
Dataset
Other

dataset

Domain consistency

Name of measure

INSPIRE Conformity

Conformance result

Title

Commission Regulation (EU) No 1089/2010 of 23 November 2010 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services

Date (Publication)
2010-12-08
Explanation

See the referenced specification
Pass
No
Statement

A basic quality control is implemented in the form of a plausibility check. Possible outcomes of this plausibility check for the validity of an observation are: 'possible', 'suspicious' or 'false'. This assessment is made immediately after the reception of the observation by comparing it to the latest INCA-BE output. There is no offline revision of this plausibility at a later time.

Metadata

File identifier
RMI_DATASET_APPOBS XML
Metadata language
English
Hierarchy level
Dataset
Date stamp
2025-09-08
Metadata author
Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role

Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium

info@meteo.be

Point of contact
Other language
Language Character encoding
French UTF8
Dutch; Flemish UTF8
German UTF8
 
 

Overviews

overview

Spatial extent

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