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.

Date (Creation): 2019-08-01

Identifier: RMI-be / appobs

Status: On going

Point of contact

Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium

Owner

Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium

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

National

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:

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Scientific publications should refer to https://doi.org/10.5194/ecss2023-50

Classification: Unclassified

Spatial representation type: Vector

Metadata language: English

Topic category

Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere

Begin date: 2019-08-01T00:00:00

Unique resource identifier: EPSG:4258

Distribution format

CSV ( 1.0 )
GeoJSON ( 1.0 )

OnLine resource: RMI opendata portal ( WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link )
RMI opendata portal

OnLine resource: appobs:appobs ( OGC:WMS-1.3.0-http-get-capabilities )
WMS 1.3.0 getCapabilities document

OnLine resource: appobs:appobs ( OGC:WFS-1.0.0-http-get-capabilities )
WFS 1.0.0 getCapabilities document

OnLine resource: Documentation ( WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link )
Documentation

OnLine resource: Reyniers, Maarten, Simon, André, Delobbe, Laurent, Deckmyn, Alex, & Goudenhoofdt, Edouard. (2021). The INCA-BE system: ten years of operational nowcasting and its applications at the national meteorological service of Belgium (p. 42). Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5798952 ( WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link )
Reyniers, Maarten, Simon, André, Delobbe, Laurent, Deckmyn, Alex, & Goudenhoofdt, Edouard. (2021). The INCA-BE system: ten years of operational nowcasting and its applications at the national meteorological service of Belgium (p. 42). Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5798952

OnLine resource: Reyniers, M., Delobbe, L., and Watelet, S.: Citizen observations via smartphone in Belgium: data collection and applications, 11th European Conference on Severe Storms, Bucharest, Romania, 8–12 May 2023, ECSS2023-50, https://doi.org/10.5194/ecss2023-50, 2023. ( WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link )
Reyniers, M., Delobbe, L., and Watelet, S.: Citizen observations via smartphone in Belgium: data collection and applications, 11th European Conference on Severe Storms, Bucharest, Romania, 8–12 May 2023, ECSS2023-50, https://doi.org/10.5194/ecss2023-50, 2023.

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Other: dataset

Domain consistency

Name of measure: INSPIRE Conformity

Conformance result

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.