Your local snow conditions brought to you by citizen scientists

Accurate snowfall measurement helps city managers decide on snow clearing operations to keep city traffic and services running smoothly. Most of the time, scientific and government agencies collect the snowfall data with sophisticated equipment at sites outside of urban areas such as airports. However, the data collected there can be different from snowfall within central urban areas nearby.

In our paper, we describe the results from a citizen science study of snowfall measurements in the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. During the winters of 2013–2014 and 2014–2015, volunteers used low-tech equipment (e.g., wooden stakes) to monitor daily snowfall, snow accumulation on the ground, as well as the density and amount of water in the snow pack outside their office on the University of Saskatoon’s campus. We compared the data collected by the volunteers to information collected by professionals at less urban locations (e.g., the airport weather station operated by Environment and Climate Change Canada).

The results from the citizen science project were reliable and comparable to the other measurements. The choice of location to measure snowfall (i.e., in the city instead of in the open terrain of the airport) made the numbers collected by the volunteers more applicable and relevant for urban users of winter weather data. Based on surveys of the volunteers and interviews with stakeholders, the project itself additionally provided three benefits: citizens learned from each other and from the endeavor, citizens created a community of practice around snowfall measurement, and stakeholders such as city operations managers benefited from the extra information for their decision making.

Citizen science projects like this one contribute to the overall sustainability of cities, enhance citizen engagement with issues like climate change, and build empathy between urban service providers and people living with, and depending on, those services.

Read the full paper — DIY meteorology: use of citizen science to monitor snow dynamics in a data-sparse city by Willemijn M. Appels, Lori Bradford, Kwok P. Chun, Anna E. Coles and Graham Strickert on the FACETS website.