Utilising Citizen Science Rain Data for Improved Rainfall Estimation in Urban Pluvial Flooding

Did you know there are millions of rain observations from thousands of privately owned automated weather stations located throughout Britain (and beyond) held in a freely accessible online archive? Citizen Scientists are sharing detailed sub-daily weather observations, including from locations where other gauge data is not available, often in close to real-time. There is distinct clustering of rain gauges in British urban areas, and with an anticipated increase in convective storms resulting in localised pluvial flooding, such high-resolution data should not be ignored. The aims of this research are to assess data quality, investigate how access to the data can be made easier, and to explore how the data can be used to support improved flood risk assessment.

British rain observations are presented, spanning 10 years from more than 3000 unique citizen science weather stations via the Met Office WOW archive. These citizen science observations have the potential to fill gaps in the official monitoring network run by the Met Office and agencies responsible for flooding in Britain. Analysis indicates that if the official ground based rain gauge network was interpolated on a 5km grid there would be coverage for 36% of Britain, but if citizen science weather stations were included that figure increases to over 50%. A methodology to identify poor quality observations has been developed; the preliminary findings show that even where absolute values may be inaccurate, citizen science gauges can capture the pattern of extreme rainfall. Examples are shown from work in progress showing how combining citizen science observations with official rain data (radar and ground based gauges) can improve delineation of specific events that resulted in pluvial flooding.