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What Low‐Cost Sensors Can Tell Us About Urban Microclimates: A Case Study Around London's Olympic Park

Oscar Brousse,Dong Ma,Charles H Simpson,Hector Altamirano,Samuel Stamp,Edward Barrett,Clare Heaviside

Published 2025 in Meteorological Applications

ABSTRACT

Urban sensor deserts call for a densification of weather sensor networks to provide climate information to local residents and decision‐makers. We evaluated the usability of low‐cost long‐range communication weather sensors for urban microclimate studies. Focusing on the east of London, next to the Olympic Park, from the 20th of June 2024 to the 21st of June 2025, we showed that low‐cost weather sensors can inform about existing climate differences between local heterogeneous urban environments. We found that the Olympic Park was cooler than surrounding neighbourhoods throughout the year and that greater differences were observed during the summer. Studied districts located further from the Olympic Park were warmer than the closest ones by 0.21°C on average. They were also hotter than the Olympic Park by 0.53°C on average, going up to 0.87°C during summer. This highlighted the benefits brought by parks in providing cooling to local populations. Districts with a greater presence of water bodies also experienced cooler conditions during the day and warmer during the night than their built‐up counter parts. During winter and spring, several days had lower daily maxima than the local park in these districts with a higher proportion of water bodies, with cooling reaching down to ~2°C and with about 50% of winter days observing cooling of ~0.5°C. Data from low‐cost weather sensors should be carefully interpreted during cold seasons and during daytime hours due to the low accuracy of these sensors. Only ~30%, ~10%, and ~50% of daily average differences to the Olympic Park fell outside of the range of uncertainty in autumn, winter, and spring, respectively. The yearly and seasonal temperature differences compared to the Olympic Park are, however, not caused by sensor errors. Observation of more complicated phenomena, like urban heat advection, remains challenging at local scales.

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