Aerial Weather Stations and the Quest to Understand Built Environments

This paper responds to the growing desire to systematically gather environmental feedback in cities through the deployment of networks of connected sensors which collect and transmit data, to register change, uncover trends and diagnose potential environmental threats. However, we recognise the novelty of such information gathered and its perceivably limited application in the design decision process. We hypothesise that with the advent of affordable weather sensors, designers will be able to develop custom data capture solutions to improve city-scale weather file data. In order to test this hypothesis, the paper investigates the possibility of using a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) equipped with lightweight climatic sensors to refine representative city-scale environmental data. First, we reflect on issues of accuracy and site-specificity and discuss whether our access to low-cost sensors might liberate our dependency on weather data files. Second, we illustrate how such data may aid in serving the designers to make sense of local micro-climatic phenomena. We conclude with a summary of considerations based on a case study conducted in Melbourne, Australia.