City Climate Monitoring System for Zürich, Basel and Tallinn

A fully automated IoT measurement network was installed in these 3 cities' urban areas (as well as in the surrounding rural areas), measuring air temperature and precipitation at typically ≥50 different locations selected according to scientific and social criteria, covering all local climate zones and points of interest, in places where the (much more costly) official WMO-standard stations can not operate due to technical restrictions. Where available, data from existing measurement systems were be integrated into the processing chain. The real-time IoT monitoring system was calibrated with local WMO-standard quality-controlled measurements,  utilised satellite data and micro-scale models developed by meteoblue,  to generate special city climate maps (e.g., heat maps which detect and visualise the urban heat island effect at the spatial resolution of 10 m, cold air flow maps, or precipitation risk maps). The real-time monitoring system and resulting maps were integrated into existing city management platforms.

Applications include using these data with a surface energy balance model to calculate possible options for climate change adaptation measures (e.g., roof greening, irrigation, de-sealing of surfaces) for urban hot-spots, to select the best adaptation strategies for parts of the city. Additionally, the effectiveness of  climate change adaptation measures in the process of being implemented can be tracked, so the economic effectiveness of the measures can be assessed, by comparing with other locations where no adjustment took place.

The combination of IoT network and Microscale modelling provides better results of modelling, cold air flow tracking and  measuring adaptation effectiveness at a significantly lower cost of implementation and operation than alternative methods.