Spatial bias in placement of citizen and conventional weather stations and their impact on urban climate research: A case study of the Urban Heat Island effect in Canada

Abstract

Citizen Weather Stations (CWS) are a source of Crowdsourced Geographic Information for urban climate research, which can provide extensive datasets in areas where data are scarce or unavailable. In this article, we explore the efficacy of using meteorological data from CWS in studying the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect across Canada during late spring and summer of 2022. In particular, we evaluate the distribution of CWS before relying on them for UHI intensity estimates, since potential spatial biases in placement of these sensors can greatly affect canopy-level measurements. We compared the spatial distribution of Netatmo CWS with conventional weather stations from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), and found that ECCC sensors are more numerous in rural areas, while Netatmo sensors are present in greater numbers in urban areas. We then computed UHI intensity using urban temperature from Netatmo sensors and peri-urban temperature from ECCC sensors. The resulting intensity values were higher than those estimated using either the Netatmo or the ECCC sensors individually, thus highlighting the influence of sensor distribution in estimating UHI magnitude. Overall, our research explores the distribution of both ECCC and CWS sensors, and highlights their potential complementarity in urban climate research.