Weather and Air Quality Data of Helsinki

Abstract

The topic of this thesis is “Weather and air quality data of Helsinki” and the main objective was researching, analyzing and classifying the contents and of the weather and air quality data for the Cityzer project. The final objective was to map and understand the data and the business ecosystem around it, and then classify the data and paint a picture of the whole ecosystem around the data.

The aim was to work with the weather companies and partners, such as Vaisala, Pegasor, The Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority and Tampere University of Technology, and analyse how they collect data and where they are stored. This thesis was an analysis of the data source, form and origin. This theory is divided into five parts: “Air Quality and Weather”, “Helsinki’s situation”, “Big Data”, “The Internet of Things” and “Data, Information, Knowledge and Value”.

It looks deeper into the weather and air quality situation in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, and studied the factors that affect weather and air quality, how weather and air quality can be measured and the current situation and problems of the air quality in Helsinki. It also gives a brief insight on Big Data and its architecture and also the Internet of Things. The main research question is “What kind of data is available for analysing weather and air quality in the Helsinki region?” and sub questions backing up the main question are the data provided by the Cityzer project partners, the weather and air quality data: the origin of the data, their contents and storage place and how they were classified. The different partners and com-panies were interviewed to understand their role in the project to collect answers to the question mentioned above.

From the interviews, it was concluded that most of the partners provided the data to other partners and third parties, such as FMI, HSY, TUT and Pegaosr. Vaisala manufactured devices and sold them to the other organizations, so that they could collect the data via the devices. FMI is also the founder and system orchestrator of the Cityzer project. Most of the air quality data were collected by monitoring stations and sensors, and the biggest con-cern was pollutants. The data contains detailed information on air quality emission sources and particle emissions and also metadata. The data are stored in hard drives, cloud ser-vices or in servers. In HSY’s case, it sends the data to FMI through an air quality portal and FMI, in turn, publishes them online. The data are classified by different models, nowcast-ing, Finnish air quality index or weather parameters. There were other partners of the pro-ject that we not interviewed, such as INNO-W, Emtele, Sasken and CLIC Innovation, as they didn’t deal with the data at all but were involved with the business side of the project.

The mission of the Cityzer project is to develop new digital services and products to sup-port decision making processes related to weather and air quality in cities. The long-term goal of the project is to issue early warnings and forecasts, which would prevent weather-related accidents, lessen human distress and costs from weather-related damage and poor air quality, and generally improve the resilience and safety of the society. The data provid-ed by project services could be used to guide rescue services and plan preventive actions and design secure solutions in city planning. This thesis will provide the partners with useful information on their data, which they can demonstrate to outside parties. The Cityz-erDEMO is a pilot demonstrating the Cityzer ecosystem in the Helsinki Metropolitan area. CityzerDEMO is currently being planned and implemented, and is expected to be opened for public in late 2017 or early 2018.