Engaging schools to explore meteorological observational gaps

Today, the vast majority of meteorological data are collected in open, rural environments to comply with the standards set by the World Meteorological Organization. However, these traditional networks lack local information that we need for example for high-resolution numerical weather prediction or to assess climate adaptation measures. The citizen science project called VLINDER uses a novel approach for addressing this observational gap based on an intense collaboration with high schools. The collaboration resulted in the establishment of a region-wide climate monitoring network of about 70 accurate weather stations in a wide variety of locations across northern Belgium e.g. in city centers, forests, lakes, industrial environments,... The stations measure temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wind and pressure and data are transferred every 5 minutes via IoT-technology. The resulting data can be consulted in realtime on the project’s dashboard (https://vlinder.ugent.be/dashboard/) which contains an API to extract the data. To guarantee a sustainable and mutually valuable collaboration, the schools and their students are involved at all stages, ranging from proposing measurement locations, building the weather stations, and even data analysis. The approach received overwhelming enthusiasm from high schools and students and resulted in a high-accuracy monitoring network with unique locations offering novel insights. The data collected by the stations are used both by schools who received educational material to explore the data in the classroom and by scientists e.g. to evaluate hectometric NWP runs. With this presentation we would like to share our experiences and the lessons learnt to encourage and help colleagues in exploring and setting up collaborations with schools.