Realtime Weather Monitoring Network Freiburg

Climate adaptation and emergency management in cities present significant challenges that can be addressed through the incorporation of real-time weather, air quality, exposure, and vulnerability data. However, existing commercial sensor network solutions often lack the necessary characteristics and wide spectrum of observed variables require to map average conditions and weather extremes at the street-level, capturing intra-urban variabilities and microclimates that directly impact people. In response, we have developed a custom two-tiered sensor system, deployed on city-owned street lights in Freiburg, Germany. The system currently consists of 13 self-developed "Tier-I stations" and 29 commercial "Tier-II stations" (LoRAIN NBIoT, Pessl Instruments GmbH), aimed at providing a modular, user-friendly Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with high spatial density and temporal resolution for research and public use. Our Tier-I stations were designed from the ground up, including the printed circuit board (PCB), to support temporally high-resolution WSNs, to accommodate a wide range of sensors, and to allow for expandability. The setup is easily expandable through the addition of predefined sensors to a configuration file, and each station seamlessly integrates itself with the server and other processes. Remote access, bidirectional communication, and task distribution protocols further enhance system modularity and ease of maintenance. In addition to air temperature, humidity and precipitation measured by the Tier II stations, the Tier-I station feature a ClimaVUE 50 all-in-one weather sensor and a BlackGlobe (Campbell Scientific, Inc.) that provides data on wind, radiation, pressure, lightning, solar radiation and black globe temperatures which allows for real-time calculation of thermal comfort indices. The near-real-time data can be accessed through our self-developed "uniWeather" iOS app and API, facilitating data-driven decision-making and public outreach. In addition, we will discuss the spatiotemporal heat stress patterns in Freiburg based on the first full year of measurements at one-minute resolution.