Manual and Automated Marine Weather Observations Using Smartphones

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Accurate marine weather nowcasts and forecasts are critical requirements for mariners to maintain situational awareness and ensure safe navigation for vessels, passengers, crew, and cargo. To best achieve this, reliable observations of atmospheric and sea conditions must be available at high spatial and temporal coverage. Unfortunately, existing approaches for marine weather observations are inadequate. To address this need, Creare proposes to develop and commercialize the MarineCitizen software for collection and aggregation of marine observations using smartphones. MarineCitizen enables collection of crowd sourced marine observations through different modes of operation, including entry of manual observations (including text, audio, and images), automated polling of internal phone sensors (e.g., barometer), and Bluetooth connectivity to external weather stations. The observational data are uploaded to a central MarineCitizen server for dissemination via a web interface, as well as sharing on social media sites such as Twitter. Machine learning techniques will also be used for labeling of marine conditions from submitted images.SUMMARY OF ANTICIPATED RESULTS: MarineCitizen will enable aggregation of surface-level marine weather observations at high spatial and temporal coverage. This will provide mariners with improved situational awareness during current and planned navigational routes. These data will also be used by marine forecasters and weather researchers for improvement of maps of current and future conditions, data assimilation of numerical weather forecasts, and post-evaluations of forecast accuracy.