Trust me, my neighbors say it's raining outside: ensuring data trustworthiness for crowdsourced weather stations

Decision making in utilities, municipal, and energy companies depends on accurate and trustworthy weather information and predictions. Recently, crowdsourced personal weather stations (PWS) are being increasingly used to provide a higher spatial and temporal resolution of weather measurements. However, tools and methods to ensure the trustworthiness of the crowdsourced data in real-time are lacking. In this paper, we present a Reputation System for Crowdsourced Rainfall Networks (RSCRN) to assign trust scores to personal weather stations in a region. Using real PWS data from the Weather Underground service in the high flood risk region of Norfolk, Virginia, we evaluate the performance of the proposed RSCRN. The proposed method is able to converge to a confident trust score for a PWS within 10--20 observations after installation. Collectively, the results indicate that the trust score derived from the RSCRN can reflect the collective measure of trustworthiness to the PWS, ensuring both useful and trustworthy data for modeling and decision-making in the future.