The Open Urban Climate Observatory, in short OpenUCO, is a scientific project in Berlin where citizens can participate by measuring the weather and analysing the climate of the city. OpenUCO is a collaboration of different universities, research institutions such as for citizen science, and an association for allotment gardens. The result is a very detailed insight into the urban climate. But why is that so important?
Since 1908, weather observations have been recorded in Dahlem, a quarter in Berlin, Germany. This is a result of the city monitoring network, led by the Institute of Meteorology at the Freie Universität Berlin, which is also located in that area. Over the years, the network of sensors was extended, and stations now measure, for example, air temperature and humidity. Some of the stations are part of the Berlin City Measurement Network. This is an automatic, long-term observation network for climate data that provides information about precipitation, and surface and ground temperature. Some stations also record wind direction and speed, sunshine and precipitation duration, air pressure, and radiation variables. Here, the sensors do a measurement every minute, resulting in around 100,000 values that were collected by the Freie Universität Berlin per day, providing a dense data collection. Data from the period of 1998-2019 are available for everyone: Interested persons can contact the Institute of Meteorology and gain access to the data after submitting a statement on the purpose of use. You can find out more about Urban Microclimate Network on the project page of the university website.
But the city of Berlin is constantly changing: Due to increased urban growth, it is now one of the most populated cities in the European Union. The resulting negative climate effects, such as longer and more frequent heat waves, affect the health of the urban population, further exacerbated by general climate warming. For example, the spatial heterogeneity of Berlin leads to a highly differentiated distribution of temperature, or other climate variables, within the city – this cannot be covered by the traditional measurement system. Thus, it makes sense to build a more granular city measurement network with the help of citizens.
The Urban Climate Observatory is an existing network for scientific measurements that was opened, following a citizen science approach – resulting in the OpenUCO project. Here, each of the 100 involved citizens got a measuring device “My Own Sub-Scale Instrument”, the so-called MESSI. These have been developed and tested at Freie Universität Berlin and Technische Universität Berlin. The project opened science up for citizen’s co-production and co-creation: Participants, mainly holders of allotment gardens, not only produced high-resolution precipitation and temperature data but were also consulted with regard to research questions on the urban climate. The collected data is freely available via the open UCO Berlin.
Apart from generating a detailed set of data for scientific purposes, the aim of OpenUCO was to actively involve citizens in urban environmental science and in this way to raise awareness of environmental processes. The project ended in December 2023.
You can read more about OpenUCO on the website of Freie Universität Berlin.
(FG)
Literature:
Longo, Antonella; Zappatore, Marco; Bochicchio, Mario A. (2020). “Apollon: Towards a Citizen Science Methodology for Urban Environmental Monitoring.” Future Generation Computer Systems 112: 899-912. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2020.06.041
