Data formats and standards for opportunistic rainfall sensors

Martin Fencl*, Roberto Nebuloni, Jafet C. M. Andersson, Vojtech Bares, Nico Blettner, Greta Cazzaniga, Christian Chwala, Matteo Colli, Lotte de Vos, Abbas El Hachem, Charles Galdies, Filippo Giannetti, Maximilian Graf, Dror Jacoby, Hai Victor Habi, Petr Musil, Jonatan Ostrometzky, Giacomo Roversi, Fabiola Sapienza, Jochen SeidelAnna Spackova, Remco van de Beek, Bas Walraven, Karina Wilgan, Xin Zheng

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Opportunistic sensors are increasingly used for rainfall measurement. However, their raw data are collected by a variety of systems that are often not primarily intended for rainfall monitoring, resulting in a plethora of different data formats and a lack of common standards. This hinders the sharing of opportunistic sensing (OS) data, their automated processing, and, at the end, their practical usage and integration into standard observation systems. This paper summarises the experiences of the more than 100 members of the OpenSense Cost Action involved in the OS of rainfall. We review the current practice of collecting and storing precipitation OS data and corresponding metadata, and propose new common guidelines describing the requirements on data and metadata collection, harmonising naming conventions, and defining human-readable and machine readable file formats for data and metadata storage. We focus on three sensors identified by the OpenSense community as prominent representatives of the OS of precipitation: Commercial microwave links (CML): fixed point-to-point radio links mainly used as backhauling connections in telecommunication networks Satellite microwave links (SML): radio links between geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellites and ground user terminals. Personal weather stations (PWS): non-professional meteorological sensors owned by citizens. The conventions presented in this paper are primarily designed for storing, handling, and sharing historical time series and do not consider specific requirements for using OS data in real time for operational purposes. The conventions are already now accepted by the ever growing OpenSense community and represent an important step towards automated processing of OS raw data and community development of joint OS software packages.

Original languageEnglish
Article number169
JournalOpen Research Europe
Volume3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024

Keywords

  • commercial microwave links
  • data format
  • data standards
  • naming conventions
  • opportunistic rainfall sensing
  • personal weather stations
  • satelllite microwave links

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