Quality assessment of private weather station Netatmo

Sammanfattning: Netatmo is a brand of private weather stations that over the past decade, in many countries, have grown to outnumber the number of government based weather stations. In most fields of research, a high number of data points can increase accuracy and precision. For a weather forecast, the more weather condition throughout an area the forecasters know about, the better the forecast. All of Sweden is the area of focus for this thesis. Weather forecasts is an important function in any society, and even crucial for certain industries that are dependent of weather patterns one way or another. Therefore, if additional data points could be added to weather forecast algorithms, likely improvements of a weather systems predicted track and development could be done (such as; will there be rain? When and how much?). Therefore it makes sense to investigate the basic usefulness of private weather stations. This bachelor project was built around investigating and evaluating Netatmo stations in Sweden. Netatmo stations are capable of measuring a couple of different types of parameters, namely pressure, temperature, wind strength and direction, precipitation and relative humidity. Precipitation is the selected parameter for this thesis. To this date, precipitation is less investigated in the scientific community, in comparison for example to temperature, which has a rather well evaluated accuracy. The aims was to evaluate if it is worth doing further investigations of the Netatmo weather station network. The preliminary results provided by this bachelor project show some problems with the precision of the rain gauge featured with Netatmo, but the upside of having so many more points of data show some promise. Especially when handling the data from a statistical approach.