Development of a web-mapping application for urban climate monitoring & research: experience from Moscow, Russia

The problems of climate change, high-impact weather phenomena and human thermal comfort in urban areas nowadays receives more and more attention not only from urban scientific community, but also from professionals in related fields as well as from general public.

Today, publicly available weather-focused web services and applications experience rapid development and expansion. However, such services focused on urban climate are very rare and have limited usability. In this presentation, we share our experience in development of web-mapping application for urban climate monitoring & research for Moscow megacity in Russia. We aim to develop the web-application which provides observation-based evidence about current and historical weather conditions and human thermal comfort in Moscow region. Such application could be a valuable tool not only for urban climate researchers, but also for citizens planning their outdoor activity, weather and climate enthusiasts, weather-focused media, popularization of science, school and university education, etc.

Previously, we have developed a prototype of such web-mapping application, which collects and maps observations at official weather stations and crowdsourced observations at Netatmo citizen weather stations (Varentsov et al., 2020).  Application backend includes software for automated data collection, PostgreSQL database, data preprocessing tools (quality control for Netatmo data, spatial interpolation, simple model for on-the-fly calculations of Universal Thermal Climate Index representing human thermal comfort), GIS-server Geoserver for showing raster data. The application frontend is based on the OpenLayers web mapping library. The database is accessed by using the supplementary Node.js server application.

Current stage of development includes several new tasks. Firstly, we plan to increase the timespan of historical data available in the application by 2005-2022. Secondly, we plan to develop interactive tools for data analysis, including time series plots and temporal averaging. Finally, we plan to supplement the application by the catalogue of illustrative weather events, such as cases with intense urban heat island, extreme precipitation, and dangerous thermal stress, and to provide popular description of such cases. The recent version of web-application under development is available at http://carto.geogr.msu.ru/mosclim2/.

Acknowledgements: Development of web-application was supported by Russian Geographic Society under grant No. 03/2021-Р. Selection of intense precipitation cases for catalogue of illustrative weather events was supported by the grant of President of Russian Federation for young PhD scientists No. МК-5988.2021.1.5. Data analysis performed by Mikhail Varentsov was also funded by Non-commercial Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Education INTELLECT.

Reference: Varentsov M. I., Samsonov T. E., Kargashin P. E., Korosteleva P. A., Varentsov A. I., Perkhurova A. A., & Konstantinov P. I. (2020). Citizen weather stations data for monitoring applications and urban climate research: an example of Moscow megacity. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 611(1), 012055. https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/611/1/012055