Cars as next generation mobile weather stations: an initial investigation

Modern automobiles are becoming more and more “computers on the wheels” having lots of digital equipment on board. Such equipment is both for the comfort and entertainment of the passengers and for their safety. Sensors play a key role in measuring several parameters of the car performance (e.g., traction control, anti-lock breaking system) and also environmental  parameters are observed directly (e.g., air temperature) or can be somehow inferred (e.g., precipitation via windscreen wipers activity/speed).

KNMI has been provided air temperature recorded every 10 minutes by thousands of vehicles driving in the Netherlands for the period January-October 2020. We have performed an initial exploratory temporal and spatial analysis to understand the most promising periods of the day and areas where sufficient data is available to perform a more thorough data analysis in the future. Furthermore, we have performed a correlation analysis between the outside temperature measured by cars and air and ground temperature observed by official weather station sensors placed at one location on the Dutch highways. The correlation results for three randomly selected days (with different weather conditions) show a good positive correlation coefficient ranging from 0.93 to 0.76 for car and station air temperature and from 0.91 to 0.67 for car temperature and station ground temperature.

This initial exploration paves the way to the use of (OEM) car data as (mobile) weather stations. We foresee in the future to use a combination of sensed variables from cars such as air temperature, traction control, windscreen wipers activity for example to improve observations of road slipperiness and related warning systems that are not restricted to Dutch highways only.