MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4406154775 · doi:10.1016/j.uclim.2024.102280

Spatial bias in placement of citizen and conventional weather stations and their impact on urban climate research: A case study of the Urban Heat Island effect in Canada

2025· article· en· W4406154775 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueUrban Climate · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicUrban Heat Island Mitigation
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
FundersMcGill University
KeywordsUrban heat islandUrban climateEnvironmental scienceHot weatherClimatologyClimate changeGeographyMeteorologyUrban climatologyUrban planningOceanographyCivil engineeringEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Citizen Weather Stations (CWS) are a source of Crowdsourced Geographic Information for urban climate research, which can provide extensive datasets in areas where data are scarce or unavailable. In this article, we explore the efficacy of using meteorological data from CWS in studying the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect across Canada during late spring and summer of 2022. In particular, we evaluate the distribution of CWS before relying on them for UHI intensity estimates, since potential spatial biases in placement of these sensors can greatly affect canopy-level measurements. We compared the spatial distribution of Netatmo CWS with conventional weather stations from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), and found that ECCC sensors are more numerous in rural areas, while Netatmo sensors are present in greater numbers in urban areas. We then computed UHI intensity using urban temperature from Netatmo sensors and peri-urban temperature from ECCC sensors. The resulting intensity values were higher than those estimated using either the Netatmo or the ECCC sensors individually, thus highlighting the influence of sensor distribution in estimating UHI magnitude. Overall, our research explores the distribution of both ECCC and CWS sensors, and highlights their potential complementarity in urban climate research. • Citizen weather stations (CWS) are located largely in Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs), surrounded mostly by built-up areas • Conventional weather stations are more distributed in rural areas, and are mostly surrounded by vegetation and water • Overall quantity of CWS increases with population • Spatial distribution of CWS and conventional sensors is complementary

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.233
Threshold uncertainty score0.435

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.030
GPT teacher head0.299
Teacher spread0.269 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it