Journal Article

Unequal distributions of crowdsourced weather data in England and Wales

Heaviside, Clare, Simpson, Charles H., Brousse, Oscar, Poorthuis, Ate

2024

Overview

Personal weather stations (PWS) can provide useful data on urban climates by densifying the number of weather measurements across major cities. They do so at a lower cost than official weather stations by national meteorological services. Despite the increasing use of PWS data, little attention has yet been paid to the underlying socio-economic and environmental inequalities in PWS coverage. Using social deprivation, demographic, and environmental indicators in England and Wales, we characterize existing inequalities in the current coverage of PWS. We find that there are fewer PWS in more deprived areas which also observe higher proportions of ethnic minorities, lower vegetation coverage, higher building height and building surface fraction, and lower proportions of inhabitants under 65 years old. This implies that data on urban climate may be less reliable or more uncertain in particular areas, which may limit the potential for climate adaptation and empowerment in those communities. Crowdsourced personal weather data are sought to cope with weather data scarcity. But, in England and Wales, more deprived areas are less covered. This limits the potential for climate adaptation of communities living in these environments.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group,Nature Portfolio
• Subject: 704/844/685 / 706/2808 / 706/648/697/129 / Adaptation / Climate / Climate adaptation / Crowdsourcing / Empowerment / Environmental indicators / Humanities and Social Sciences / Meteorological data / Meteorological services / Minority & ethnic groups / multidisciplinary / Science / Science (multidisciplinary) / Weather / Weather stations