Leuven.cool Citizen Science Urban Weather Station Network
Over 1 billion raw observations from ~110 low-cost weather stations spread across Leuven (Belgium), at 16-second resolution from June 2019 to March 2025.
- Size
- 12.9 GB
- Format
- CSV, CSV.gz
- License
- CC-BY-NC-4.0
- Access
- Open Access
- Source
- Zenodo (record 14893734)
License note: Non-commercial
Your edits to the notebook only affect your own copy in the Hub. Changed it and want the original back? Restore it here.
Challenge
Is there a measurable urban heat-island effect across Leuven's citizen weather network - are some stations systematically warmer than others, and does that gap open up at night when built-up ground releases the day's stored heat?
- Where to start
- Do NOT load a raw file whole (each quarter is hundreds of MB gzipped, billions of rows in total). Load the small STATIONS.csv for coordinates (ID, LATITUDE, LONGITUDE, ALTITUDE), then use DuckDB's read_csv_auto to aggregate ONE summer quarter (RAWDATA2019Q3.csv.gz) straight off disk: convert TEMPF to Celsius with (TEMPF-32)*5/9, filter implausible values, shift DATEUTC by +2h to local CEST, and GROUP BY station ID and hour-of-day into a ~110-station x 24-hour temperature grid.
- What to share
- A station coordinate map coloured by night-time temperature anomaly, plus a plot of the between-station spread (std of station means) versus hour of day showing whether the gap peaks in the small hours. Report the warmest-minus-coolest night gap and name which DuckDB/chunking technique you used to stay inside the 4 GB budget; optionally repeat on a winter quarter (RAWDATA2020Q1.csv.gz) to test whether the heat island is stronger in summer.
💬 Discuss this dataset, ask questions and share your results in its discussion thread. Challenges are open-ended — there's no single right answer.