Fixed weather stations with rain gauges are few and far between relative to the size of most urban areas and do not provide enough spatial resolution to give a good picture of the intensity of rainfall in small areas, like those experiencing microbursts. To do so, you need to know exactly where and how hard it’s raining, down to a very fine granularity. The research was aimed at addressing a very specific problem that civil engineers and urban planners face: it’s really hard to predict where and when flash floods will occur. While that’s clearly where the authors of the research paper from the University of Michigan see their results leading, it’s far from where they are right now. The article implies that OBDC data is being captured and mined in real time to develop a high-resolution picture of environmental conditions around a fleet of vehicles. PawełMM (this montage) Nyttend (original photographs), via Wikimedia CommonsRight off the bat, we’ll stipulate that the headline of the article linked above is a bit of a stretch compared to the meat of the actual research.
What’s a little rain going to do? Fifteen minutes difference between the top and bottom picture. But as I read through the article, I thought about that long-ago idea I had had, which amounted to a distributed sensor platform, might actually be useful for more than just detecting traffic jams. I honestly thought it was a joke at first, like something from a Monty Python sketch. So it was with great interest that I read an article claiming that windshield wiper data from connected cars can be used to prevent floods. Comically, one of the reasons I chose not to pursue my idea is that I didn’t think anyone would willingly let a company have access to their location information. Seemingly days later, everyone on the planet had a GPS-equipped smartphone in his or her pocket, and the complex system I imagined was now easily implemented as software. Genius! I had finally found my billion dollar idea. A small display would show you the hotspots and allow you to choose an alternate route. I imagined that each vehicle could have a small GPS receiver and a wireless transceiver of some sort, to send the vehicle’s current position to a central server, which would then send the aggregate speed data for each road back to the subscriber’s car. I thought: What if there was a way for the cars to tell each other where slowdowns are? This was long before smartphones, so it would have to be done the hard way. Many years ago, as I wasted yet another chunk of my life sitting in the linear parking lot that was my morning commute, I mused that there had to be a way to prevent this madness. Follow this train of thought: cars have sensors, cars are in frequent use over large areas, cars are the ultimate distributed sensor network for weather conditions.
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