A crowdsourced SkyMap

Weather reports are an integral part of almost any modern newscast service. Concise weather reports, which are often found in mobile applications, consist of logos for indicating sunshine, cloudiness, fog or rain. The weather information is usually obtained from professional weather stations. SkyMap aims to create mobile weather reports based on crowd sourcing of images that contain regions of the sky. The main motivation behind is that observing the sky gives us an intuitive understanding about the weather situation. SkyMap intends to enable sky observations from everywhere. The main working principle is to gather geo-tagged photos taken from mobile/smartphones with the help of crowdsourcing and to present the relevant sky regions on a map. We have developed mobile phone clients for Android and iOS and a server infrastructure that manages the crowd sourcing. We present the overall system design and we show the results of several feasibility studies.