Communications of the ACM
Crowdsourcing Weather Using Smartphone Batteries
A new system that crowdsources ambient temperatures takes advantage of the thermal sensors built into hundreds of thousands of smartphones.
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A team of app developers and weather experts have created a system that crowdsources hundreds of thousands of smartphone temperature readings. The system is based on the OpenSignal Android app, and takes advantage of the fact that smartphones have temperature sensors built into them to monitor the temperature of their batteries.
The researchers used the sensors to crowdsource weather information to estimate the daily average temperature for eight major cities around the world. The researchers were able to calculate the air temperatures to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of the actual value.
"The ultimate end is to be able to do things we've never been able to do before in meteorology and give those really short-term and localized predictions," says OpenSignal co-founder James Robinson. He says the app currently has about 700,000 active users, about 90 percent of whom opt in to provide statistics collected by their phones.
Robinson says a smartphone's surroundings affect its temperature. He notes that the OpenSignal effort could be potentially applied to climate and weather monitoring. "The challenge is whether we can take this technique and use it in places where we don't already have reliable weather information to retune the model," Robinson says.
From Science Daily
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