research-article

Weather with you: evaluating report reliability in weather crowdsourcing

Authors:

Evangelos Niforatos,

Athanasios Vourvopoulos,

Marc LangheinrichAuthors Info & Claims

MUM '15: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia

Pages 152 - 162

https://doi.org/10.1145/2836041.2836056

Published: 30 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Several mobile and social media weather apps support the incorporation of human input in increasing their coverage and accuracy of current weather conditions. This practice is also known as participatory sensing: the act of using sensors (i.e. smartphones) carried by volunteers to acquire highly localized measurements of physical phenomena. In order to assess the accuracy of such user contributed weather reports, we created an android app called Atmos that allows for the in situ collection of weather data in the form of descriptive manual input. Based on a yearlong study with Atmos deployed on the Google Play store, we investigate the ability of mobile users to both report current weather conditions accurately, and to predict future weather developments. We found that mobile users can be sufficiently accurate when reporting current conditions, though report accuracy was affected by hour of day. Users were also able to provide accurate short-term predictions, particularly for temperature and wind intensity. We also present results from an online survey that gathered data from 12 countries in order to understand the role weather plays in users' daily life, which helped us design Atmos.

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Cited By

Hologa RGlaser R(2021)The Societal Echo of Severe Weather Events: Ambient Geospatial Information (AGI) on a Storm EventISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information10.3390/ijgi1012081510:12(815)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10120815
Zhu YZhang SLi YLu HShi KNiu Z(2019)Social weather: A review of crowdsourcing‐assisted meteorological knowledge services through social cyberspaceGeoscience Data Journal10.1002/gdj3.857:1(61-79)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2019
https://doi.org/10.1002/gdj3.85
Maag BZhou ZThiele L(2018)W-AirProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/31917562:1(1-25)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3191756
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Weather with you: evaluating report reliability in weather crowdsourcing
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Ubiquitous and mobile computing
    1. Ubiquitous and mobile computing systems and tools

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cover image ACM Other conferences

MUM '15: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia

November 2015

442 pages

ISBN:9781450336055

DOI:10.1145/2836041

General Chairs:
Clemens Holzmann
University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg, Austria
,
René Mayrhofer
Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria
,
Program Chairs:
Jonna Häkkilä
University of Lapland
,
Enrico Rukzio
University of Ulm
,
Publications Chair:
Michael Roland
University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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FH OOE: University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
Johannes Kepler Univ Linz: Johannes Kepler Universität Linz

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 November 2015

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MUM '15

Sponsor:

FH OOE
Johannes Kepler Univ Linz

MUM '15: 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia

November 30 - December 2, 2015

Linz, Austria

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MUM '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 89 submissions, 37%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 190 of 465 submissions, 41%

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Cited By

Hologa RGlaser R(2021)The Societal Echo of Severe Weather Events: Ambient Geospatial Information (AGI) on a Storm EventISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information10.3390/ijgi1012081510:12(815)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10120815
Zhu YZhang SLi YLu HShi KNiu Z(2019)Social weather: A review of crowdsourcing‐assisted meteorological knowledge services through social cyberspaceGeoscience Data Journal10.1002/gdj3.857:1(61-79)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2019
https://doi.org/10.1002/gdj3.85
Maag BZhou ZThiele L(2018)W-AirProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/31917562:1(1-25)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3191756
Zheng FTao RMaier HSee LSavic DZhang TChen QAssumpção TYang PHeidari BRieckermann JMinsker BBi WCai XSolomatine DPopescu I(2018)Crowdsourcing Methods for Data Collection in Geophysics: State of the Art, Issues, and Future DirectionsReviews of Geophysics10.1029/2018RG00061656:4(698-740)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.1029/2018RG000616
Niforatos EVourvopoulos ALangheinrich M(2017)Understanding the potential of humanmachine crowdsourcing for weather dataInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.10.002102:C(54-68)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.10.002
Niforatos EElhart ILangheinrich M(2016)WeatherUSI: User-Based Weather Crowdsourcing on Public DisplaysWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-38791-8_50(567-570)Online publication date: 25-May-2016
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38791-8_50

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