Master thesis defense by Alessandro Falcione

Title: "A study on preprocessing and assimilation of Netatmo data in a NWP system"

Abstract: Thanks to the recent deployment of private meteorological stations even for non professional use, a much larger number of surface observations of meteorological interest can potentially be collected. The purpose of this study is to find a suitable approach to process Netatmo private weather stations observations for their use in data assimilation of the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) system HARMONIE. Two aspects of pre-processing of the Netatmo data have been investigated: one is the correction to get rid of systematic observation error in order to improve observation data quality, another is the thinning of the data to cope with the massive number of observations which significantly outnumbers the model grid points. It is found that in order to profitably assimilate pressure observations from the Netatmo network, both data bias correction and data thinning appear to be useful. Results obtained in this study, although still preliminary, indicate a promising feasibility for NWP models to make use of crowdsourced data in operational weather forecasting.

Supervisor
Eigil Kaas (NBI)
Xiaohua Yang (DMI)

Censor
Peter Aakjær