The ongoing urbanization and climate change urges further understanding and monitoring of weather in cities. Two case studies during a 17-day period over the Amsterdam metropolitan area, the Netherlands, are used to illustrate the potential and limitations of hydrometeorological monitoring using nontraditional and opportunistic sensors. We employ three types of opportunistic sensing networks to monitor six important environmental variables: 1) air temperature estimates from smartphone batteries and personal weather stations, 2) rainfall from commercial microwave links and personal weather stations, 3) solar radiation from smartphones, 4) wind speed from personal weather stations, 5) air pressure from smartphones and personal weather stations, and 6) humidity from personal weather stations. These observations are compared to dedicated, traditional observations where possible, although such networks are typically sparse in urban areas. First, we show that the passage of a front can be successfully monitored using data from several types of nontraditional sensors in a complementary fashion. Also, we demonstrate the added value of opportunistic measurements in quantifying the urban heat island (UHI) effect during a hot episode. The UHI can be clearly determined from personal weather stations, though UHI values tend to be high compared to records from a traditional network. Overall, this study illustrates the enormous potential for hydrometeorological monitoring in urban areas using nontraditional and opportunistic sensing networks.

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Accurate and timely precipitation forecasts are crucial for early warning. Rainfall nowcasting, the process of statistically extrapolating recent rainfall observations, is increasingly used for short-term forecasting. Nowcasts are generally constructed with high-resolution radar observations. As a proof of concept, we construct nowcasts with country-wide rainfall maps estimated from signal level data of commercial microwave links (CMLs) for 12 summer days in the Netherlands. CML nowcasts compare well to radar rainfall nowcasts. Provided well-calibrated CML rainfall estimates are employed, CML nowcasts can outperform unadjusted real-time radar nowcasts for high rainfall rates, which are underestimated as compared to a reference. Care should be taken with the sensitivity of the advection field derivation to areas with low CML coverage and the inherent measurement scale of CML data, which can be larger than the application scale. We see potential for rainfall nowcasting with CML data, for example, in regions where weather radars are absent.

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Commercial microwave links are installed and maintained for the purpose of telecommunication. Hydrometeors between transmitting and receiving antennas cause the microwave signal to be attenuated. From signal attenuation, the path-averaged rainfall intensity can be calculated. A 7-month dataset of instantaneously logged signal powers from almost 2000 unique links in the Netherlands is analyzed. Rainfall intensities are calculated with the RAINLINK package with a novel preprocessing module, enabling the package to be applied on instantaneously logged data from now on. Rainfall intensities per link are validated with the path-averaged rainfall intensities according to a gauge-adjusted radar product. Both the overall performance and the dependence of errors on link characteristics and measurement conditions are evaluated. The coefficient of variation decreases from 3.70 to 2.32 and the correlation increases from 0.30 to 0.63 from instantaneous to daily estimates of rainfall accumulations. The coefficient of variation is also smaller during heavy rainfall. Errors are largest for pathlengths shorter than 2 km, for observations during the late night and early morning, and for observations during colder months (when solid or melting precipitation could occur and dew is more likely to form on the antennas). Comparison of our results with those of earlier studies shows that minimum/maximum sampling (widely employed in network management systems) outperforms instantaneous sampling regarding detection of both quantity and occurrence of rain at a 15-min sampling rate in the Dutch climate.

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Many applications in urban areas require high-resolution rainfall measurements. Typical operational weather radars can provide rainfall intensities at 1-km ² grid cells every 5 min. Opportunistic sensing with commercial microwave links yields path-averaged rainfall intensities (typically 0.1–10 km) within urban areas. Additionally, large amounts of urban in situ rainfall measurements from amateur weather observers are obtainable in real-time. The accuracy of these three techniques is evaluated for an urban study area of 20 × 20 km, taking into account their respective network layouts and sampling characteristics. We use two simulated rainfall events described in terms of drop size distributions on a 100-m grid and with a temporal resolution of 30 s. Accurate radar rainfall estimation with the Z-R relationship relies heavily on an appropriate choice of parameters, and a dual-polarization strategy is more suitable for higher intensities. Under ideal measurement conditions, the weather station network is the most promising, with a Pearson correlation coefficient above 0.86 and a relative bias below 4% for 100-m rainfall estimates at 5-min resolution. Microwave link rainfall observations contain the largest error, shown by a consistently larger coefficient of variation. The accuracy of all techniques improves when considering rainfall at larger scales, especially by increasing time intervals, with the strongest improvements found for microwave links for which errors are largely caused by their temporal sampling. Sparser networks are examined, showing that the decline in measurement accuracy only becomes significant when the link and station network density are reduced to less than half their levels in Amsterdam.

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Crowdsourcing as a method to obtain and apply vast datasets is rapidly becoming prominent in meteorology, especially for urban areas where routine weather observations are scarce. Previous studies showed that smartphone battery temperature readings can be used to estimate the daily and citywide air temperature via a direct heat transfer model. This work extends model estimates by studying smaller temporal and spatial scales. The study finds the number of battery readings influences the accuracy of temperature retrievals. Optimal results are achieved for 700 or more retrievals. An extensive dataset of over 10 million battery temperature readings for estimating hourly and daily air temperatures is available for São Paulo, Brazil. The air temperature estimates are validated with measurements from a WMO station, an Urban Flux Network site, and data from seven citizen weather stations. Daily temperature estimates are good (coefficient of determination ρ² of 86%), and the study shows they improve by optimizing model parameters for neighborhood scales (< 1 km²) as categorized in local climate zones (LCZs). Temperature differences between LCZs can be distinguished from smartphone battery temperatures. When validating the model for hourly temperature estimates, the model requires a diurnally varying parameter function in the heat transfer model rather than one fixed value for the entire day. The results show the potential of large crowdsourced datasets in meteorological studies, and the value of smartphones as a measuring platform when routine observations are lacking.

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Commercial cellular telecommunication networks can be used for rainfall estimation by measuring the attenuation of electromagnetic signals transmitted between antennas from microwave links. However, as the received link signal may also decrease during dry periods, a method to separate wet and dry periods is required. Methods utilizing ground-based radar rainfall intensities or nearby link data cannot always be used. Geostationary satellites can provide a good alternative. A combination of two Meteosat Second Generation satellite precipitation products, Precipitating Clouds and Cloud Physical Properties, is employed to decide whether a 15-min time interval for a given link is rainy or not. A 12-d dataset of link-based rainfall maps for the Netherlands is validated against gauge-adjusted radar rainfall maps. Results clearly improve upon the case when no wet–dry classification is applied and thus the method shows potential for application to large areas of the world where the other methods cannot be applied.

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Quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) using ground-based weather radar is affected by many sources of error. The most important of these are (1) radar calibration, (2) ground clutter, (3) wet-radome attenuation, (4) raininduced attenuation, (5) vertical variability in rain drop size distribution (DSD), (6) non-uniform beam filling and (7) variations in DSD. This study presents an attempt to separate and quantify these sources of error in flat terrain very close to the radar (1-2 km), where (4), (5) and (6) only play a minor role. Other important errors exist, like beam blockage, WLAN interferences and hail contamination and are briefly mentioned, but not considered in the analysis. A 3-day rainfall event (25-27 August 2010) that produced more than 50mm of precipitation in De Bilt, the Netherlands, is analyzed using radar, rain gauge and disdrometer data. Without any correction, it is found that the radar severely underestimates the total rain amount (by more than 50 %). The calibration of the radar receiver is operationally monitored by analyzing the received power from the sun. This turns out to cause a 1 dB underestimation. The operational clutter filter applied by KNMI is found to incorrectly identify precipitation as clutter, especially at near-zero Doppler velocities. An alternative simple clutter removal scheme using a clear sky clutter map improves the rainfall estimation slightly. To investigate the effect of wet-radome attenuation, stable returns from buildings close to the radar are analyzed. It is shown that this may have caused an underestimation of up to 4 dB. Finally, a disdrometer is used to derive event and intra-event specific Z-R relations due to variations in the observed DSDs. Such variations may result in errors when applying the operational Marshall-Palmer Z-R relation. Correcting for all of these effects has a large positive impact on the radar-derived precipitation estimates and yields a good match between radar QPE and gauge measurements, with a difference of 5-8 %. This shows the potential of radar as a tool for rainfall estimation, especially at close ranges, but also underlines the importance of applying radar correction methods as individual errors can have a large detrimental impact on the QPE performance of the radar.

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Although rainfall estimation employing microwave links from cellular telecommunication networks is recognized as a new promising measurement technique, its potential for long-term large-scale operational rainfall monitoring remains to be demonstrated. This study contributes to this endeavor by deriving a continuous series of rainfall maps from a large 2.5 year microwave link data set of, on average, 3383 links (2044 link paths) covering Netherlands (∼3.5 × 10⁴ km²), a midlatitude country (∼5°E, ∼52°N) with a temperate climate. Maps are extensively verified against an independent gauge-adjusted radar rainfall data set for different temporal (15 min, 1 h, 1 day, 1 month) and spatial (0.9, 74 km²) scales. The usefulness of different steps in the rainfall retrieval algorithm, i.e., a wet-dry classification method and a filter to remove outliers, is systematically assessed. A novel dew filter is developed to correct for dew-induced wet antenna attenuation, which, although a relative underestimation of 6% to 9% is found, generally yields good results. The microwave link rainfall estimation technique performs well for the summer months (June, July, August), even outperforming interpolation of automatic rain gauge data (with a density of ∼1 gauge per 1000 km²), but large deviations are found for the winter months (December, January, February). These deviations are generally expected to be related to frozen or melting precipitation. Hence, our results show the potential of commercial microwave links for long-term large-scale operational rainfall monitoring.

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Corresponding author address: Manuel F. Rios Gaona, Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management Group, Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg 3, 6708 PB Wageningen, Netherlands.

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Accurate measurements of rainfall are important in many hydrological and meteorological applications, for instance, flash-flood early-warning systems, hydraulic structures design, irrigation, weather forecasting, and climate modelling. Whenever possible, link networks measure and store the received power of the electromagnetic signal at regular intervals. The decrease in power can be converted to rainfall intensity, and is largely due to the attenuation by raindrops along the link paths. Such an alternative technique fulfils the continuous effort to obtain measurements of rainfall in time and space at higher resolutions, especially in places where traditional rain gauge networks are scarce or poorly maintained.

Rainfall maps from microwave link networks have recently been introduced at country-wide scales. Despite their potential in rainfall estimation at high spatiotemporal resolutions, the uncertainties present in rainfall maps from link networks are not yet fully comprehended. The aim of this work is to identify and quantify the sources of uncertainty present in interpolated rainfall maps from link rainfall depths. In order to disentangle these sources of uncertainty, we classified them into two categories: (1) those associated with the individual microwave link measurements, i.e. the errors involved in link rainfall retrievals, such as wet antenna attenuation, sampling interval of measurements, wet/dry period classification, dry weather baseline attenuation, quantization of the received power, drop size distribution (DSD), and multi-path propagation; and (2) those associated with mapping, i.e. the combined effect of the interpolation methodology and the spatial density of link measurements. We computed ∼ 3500 rainfall maps from real and simulated link rainfall depths for 12 days for the land surface of the Netherlands. Simulated link rainfall depths refer to path-averaged rainfall depths obtained from radar data. The ∼ 3500 real and simulated rainfall maps were compared against quality-controlled gauge-adjusted radar rainfall fields (assumed to be the ground truth). Thus, we were able to not only identify and quantify the sources of uncertainty in such rainfall maps, but also test the actual and optimal performance of one commercial microwave network from one of the cellular providers in the Netherlands. Errors in microwave link measurements were found to be the source that contributes most to the overall uncertainty.

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Rainfall retrieval using weather radar relies on power functions between radar reflectivity Z and rain rate R. The nonlinear nature of these relations complicates the comparison of rainfall estimates employing reflectivities measured at different scales. Transforming Z into R using relations that have been derived for other scales results in a bias and added uncertainty. We investigate the sensitivity of Z-R relations to spatial and temporal aggregation using high-resolution reflectivity fields for five rainfall events. Existing Z-R relations were employed to investigate the behavior of aggregated Z-R relations with scale, the aggregation bias, and the variability of the estimated rain rate. The prefactor and the exponent of aggregated Z-R relations systematically diverge with scale, showing a break that is event-dependent in the temporal domain and nearly constant in space. The systematic error associated with the aggregation bias at a given scale can become of the same order as the corresponding random error associated with intermittent sampling. The bias can be constrained by including information about the variability of Z within a certain scale of aggregation, and is largely captured by simple functions of the coefficient of variation of Z. Several descriptors of spatial and temporal variability of the reflectivity field are presented, to establish the links between variability descriptors and resulting aggregation bias. Prefactors in Z-R relations can be related to multifractal properties of the rainfall field. We find evidence of scaling breaks in the structural analysis of spatial rainfall with aggregation. Key Points Nonlinear rainfall retrieval relations are susceptible to aggregation bias High-resolution radar data can help to constrain aggregation bias Aggregation bias can become of the same order as that of intermittent sampling@en

This paper presents a novel approach to estimate the vertical profile of reflectivity (VPR) from volumetric weather radar data using both a traditional Eulerian as well as a newly proposed Lagrangian implementation. For this latter implementation, the recently developed Rotational Carpenter Square Cluster Algorithm (RoCaSCA) is used to delineate precipitation regions at different reflectivity levels. A piecewise linear VPR is estimated for either stratiform or neither stratiform/convective precipitation. As a second aspect of this paper, a novel approach is presented which is able to account for the impact of VPR uncertainty on the estimated radar rainfall variability. Results show that implementation of the VPR identification and correction procedure has a positive impact on quantitative precipitation estimates from radar. Unfortunately, visibility problems severely limit the impact of the Lagrangian implementation beyond distances of 100 km. However, by combining this procedure with the global Eulerian VPR estimation procedure for a given rainfall type (stratiform and neither stratiform/convective), the quality of the quantitative precipitation estimates increases up to a distance of 150 km. Analyses of the impact of VPR uncertainty shows that this aspect accounts for a large fraction of the differences between weather radar rainfall estimates and rain gauge measurements. Key Points A new Lagrangian based VPR identification methodRadar rainfall uncertainty estimation from spatial precipitation variabilityImproved weather radar based surface rainfall estimation

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Accurate air temperature observations in urban areas are important for meteorology and energy demand planning. They are indispensable to study the urban heat island effect and the adverse effects of high temperatures on human health. However, the availability of temperature observations in cities is often limited. Here we show that relatively accurate air temperature information for the urban canopy layer can be obtained from an alternative, nowadays omnipresent source: smartphones. In this study, battery temperatures were collected by an Android application for smartphones. A straightforward heat transfer model is employed to estimate daily mean air temperatures from smartphone battery temperatures for eight major cities around the world. The results demonstrate the enormous potential of this crowdsourcing application for real-time temperature monitoring in densely populated areas.

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Using 30. years (1979-2009) of data from 33 automatic rain gauges in the Netherlands, a study of the space-time variability of rainfall is performed. This study uses 90-day averaged semi-variograms to find seasonal signals in the fitted spherical semi-variogram parameters of rainrates in the Netherlands, for accumulation intervals between 1 and 24. h. These signals can be well-described by simple cosine functions. The dependence of these cosine functions on the accumulation interval is modeled in two different ways: (1) power-law relations between the variogram parameters and the accumulation interval, and (2) power-law relations between the parameters of the cosine functions and the accumulation interval. For the first method the cosine function at the 24-h accumulation interval is also needed. The second of these methods has more parameters, but is shown to model the temporal scaling best. The space-time scaling relations found in this paper are compared to those found by others for similar and contrasting climates. Seasonality is shown to play an important role in determining rainfall spatial variability.

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