West Midlands, England, United Kingdom
Dr Simon Bell’s research revolves around the Wintersense project (wintersense.com), an ‘Internet of Things’ approach to sensing road surface temperatures. It enables dense networks of low-cost, contactless, wireless sensors to be rapidly deployed. Simon has a strong background in the use of low-cost sensing for measuring weather conditions. He is also an enthusiastic Web Developer, always looking to use programming to help solve meteorological challenges.
Simon Bell is responsible for the Wintersense project (wintersense.com).
Across the UK over a thousand members of the public regularly take observations of the weather. The majority of observations are taken using automated weather stations which are easily set up, often in the owner's garden. With so many citizen weather stations, their data could dramatically increase the resolution of surface meteorological observations. However concerns about the design, exposure, calibration and maintenance of these weather stations plus the frequent lack of metadata means it is vital to undertake the challenging task of automatically quantifying the quality of such observations. Including citizen data in data assimilation schemes (which construct the initial conditions in weather forecast models) without reliable quality estimates would be incredibly detrimental. Simon demonstrated a reliable approach for quantifying bias and uncertainty in such citizen weather data. Such an approach could help inform data users on the suitability of the data for their application.