A recent study from Tel Aviv University showed how we could use smartphones to measure temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, magnetic field, light, sound, location, acceleration, gravity, and other data to better warn of potential natural disasters.
Researchers gathered global data through an app that users opted in to. This data was collected in the background, without participants needing to manually input anything.
"We developed an index based on VPD (vapor pressure deficit), which reflects the dryness of the vegetation based on environmental parameters (temperature and humidity)," doctoral candidate Hofit Shachaf said, per Phys.org. "In hot and dry atmospheric conditions more moisture is drawn from the plants, due to enhanced evaporation and transpiration (evapotranspiration) that essentially facilitates ignition of fires. In cooler, more humid air, forests do not usually catch fire since their moisture level is too high."
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Move somewhere else 🌎 The researchers had to calibrate some of the sensors so they were in line with local weather stations as a starting point, and incoming data was likely to be excluded if, say, a phone was reading the conditions inside an office. With a large enough data set for a region, those anomalies were cleared.
"It's surprising, but even though each smartphone has its own errors and biases, with large amounts of data from many smartphones, we can average out the errors and still retain useful data. The large volume of data helps overcome issues associated with individual smartphones," Shachaf said.
This system was put to the test during wildfires in Israel in 2016 and in Portugal in 2013. Data from smartphones clearly aligned to these catastrophes.
Crowdsourcing data for better climate science and disaster management is a great way to keep large populations safe. Plus, citizen science is an empowering way for anybody to contribute to worthwhile research. Similar apps help keep tabs on pollinator populations, protect salt marshes, and prevent roadkill.
"Given the rapid increase in the number of smartphones worldwide, we propose utilizing this data source to provide better early warnings to the public and disaster managers about impending natural disasters," professor Colin Price said of the study. "Better early warnings could prevent natural hazards from becoming natural disasters."
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