Monitoring and Forecasting of Personal Environment

In view of ongoing industrial development, urbanisation, deterioration of environment and climate change, individuals, organisations and businesses are becoming more and more meteorologically/environmentally vulnerable. Modern life requires knowledge about our personal environment: climate, weather and air/water/soil quality at home or work, outdoors, in a garden or filed, etc. From the scientific standpoint, personal environment is the lower essentially turbulent atmospheric planetary boundary layer (PBL) — immediately affected by interactions with underlying land/water surfaces, separated from the free atmosphere by the low-turbulence interface, and controlled by the properties of underlying soils, buildings, vegetation and surface waters. The time is ripe to employ recent achievements in understanding the nature of atmospheric PBL, turbulence, chemistry and aerosols, so that to radically improve general architecture of meteorological and air quality observations, including those provided from crowdsourcing; very high resolution meteorological and air-quality modelling and forecasting. In the near future traditional top-down meteorological monitoring by national weather services will be ever more supplemented through private bottom-up monitoring by individuals, meteorologically dependent businesses (such as transport, agriculture, energy sector, etc.) and volunteer organisations (e.g., schools). Heavily polluted megacities are disposed for establishing massive private environmental monitoring, and provide an increasing market for inexpensive instruments, e.g., indicators of outdoor and indoor air quality. This process is already on track. It is important to harmonise it with current developments in atmospheric science, industry of observations, and environmental management.

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