Quality Check of IoT-based Surface Air Temperature, Relative Humidity, and Precipitation Detection Observations: Focusing on Seoul in 2020 Summer
This study evaluates the quality of surface air temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation detection observed by 22 internet of thing (IoT)-based mini-weather stations in Seoul in 2020 summer. The automatic weather station (AWS) closest to each IoT-based station is used as reference. The IoT-based observations show surface air temperature and relative humidity are about 0.2-4.0°C higher and about -1--22% lower than the AWS observations, respectively. However, they exhibit temporal variability similar to the AWS observations on both diurnal and daily time scales, with daily correlations greater than 0.90 for temperature and 0.82 for relative humidity. Given these strong linear relationships, it show that temperature and relative humidity biases can be effectively corrected by applying a simple bias correction method. For IoT-based precipitation detection, we found that precipitation conductivity value (PCV) during precipitation events is well separated from that during non-precipitation events, providing a basis for distinguishing precipitation events from non-precipitation events. When the PCV threshold is set to 250 for precipitation detection, the highest critical success index and the bias score index close to one, suitable for operational precipitation detection, are obtained. These results demonstrate that IoT-based mini-weather stations can successfully measure surface air temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation detection with appropriate bias corrections.