Gridded Climatologies from Crowdsourced Data: A 12-Year Daily Dataset for Climate Services in the UK

Crowdsourced observations have significant potential to enhance our understanding of urban climates. Compared to existing baselines that underpin numerous climate services, gridded climatologies built from crowdsourced observations have the potential to show substantial increases in estimated heat hazard. Yet, the transient nature and variable quality of such observation networks offers challenges to building long-term gridded datasets of a comparable quality to those built from standard observing networks.

Leveraging the maturity of the Met Office’s Weather Observations Website (WOW), this project is building on a previous regional-scale pilot study to produce a twelve-year gridded crowdsourced temperature dataset at national scale. WOW observations from the period 2013-2024 are quality-controlled and interpolated to yield a set of daily grids of maximum, minimum, and mean temperature at 1km resolution for the UK.

The resulting urban-sensitive decadal record will offer a step-change in capability for urban climate services. The dataset has been co-designed with government partners to support the assessment of vulnerability posed by overheating to buildings, and research into mitigation/adaptation decisions across the public sector estate. Furthermore, the methodologies that have been developed will provide a springboard for further exploration into the potential impact of transient sensing - where the composition of a crowdsourced dataset evolves over time - on the resilience of crowdsourced climatological baselines.