Starship Asterisk*

A paper (not mine) has just been accepted to Geophysics Research Letters titled "Crowdsourcing urban air temperatures from smartphone battery temperature" by Overeem et al. Here is a link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 6/abstract .

I had not known about this paper (thanks to colleague RA Shaw for pointing it out). As with many smartphone projects, it uses the devices in a way that I had not even considered previously. Here, the internal battery temperature is correlated with outdoor temperatures in cities to increase knowledge of urban temperatures for meteorology and power consumption. I didn't even know that smartphones tracked their own battery temperatures! This is a real smartphone-as-science-sensor paper. Even in retrospect, I am surprised that smartphones can be used in this way, as it seems to me that personal smartphones would typically sit in varied conditions, including sunlight, shade, heated buildings, and air-conditioned buildings. Still, kudos to them for not only designing a pioneering science application with smartphone sensors, but carrying it out and writing the paper. They also give a few citations near the end of smartphones being considered for other meteorological endeavors.

RJN wrote:Even in retrospect, I am surprised that smartphones can be used in this way, as it seems to me that personal smartphones would typically sit in varied conditions, including sunlight, shade, heated buildings, and air-conditioned buildings.

Certainly, this makes the error component of any single sensor very large... larger than the signal, perhaps. But consider the sort of data reduction and noise analysis that is possible when you have thousands or even millions of sensors!