A project called Camaliot will use Android phones to help predict weather conditions. Here's how.
Camaliot is a campaign funded by the European space agency, the European Space Agency. The first project of this campaign requires Android phone users around the world who want to participate in weather forecasting.
How the system works is quite simple, because it only requires a GPS receiver on the phone. However, the Camaliot application only works on phones with Android OS 7 and above, which already supports satellite -based navigation.
With the application, the phone will look for signals from satellite networks that orbit at a fixed place. The satellite then sends a message, complete with the time and location.
Then when the message is received, the user's phone calculates the delivery time needed to send the message, which is then compared to the phone's location on earth.
According to researchers at Camaliot, they can use satellite signals (and travel times) to estimate the humidity conditions in the atmosphere. The reason is that according to them, the water in the atmosphere can affect the speed of signal transmission from satellites to devices such as mobile phones.
So the data collected by Camaliot is the signal strength, the distance between the satellite and the mobile phone, and the phase of the satellite operator. When the data collected was sufficient, the researchers theorized that they could combine the data with existing weather data and calculate long -term trends of water evaporation.
The hope is to use the data to develop a machine learning model for weather forecasting. They can also monitor changes in the Earth's ionosphere (the part of the atmosphere closest to space).
If they could really monitor the ionosphere, weather forecasts in outer space should be more accurate. Including making Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) more accurate by entering information such as geomagnetic storms.
In the future, this system can also be expanded to collect data from various sensors in the internet of things (IoT) devices. Camaliot has currently recorded more than 50 mobile phone models that have receivers for two frequencies at once.
These phones include the Google Pixel 4a, Samsung Galaxy S21, Galaxy S21 Ultra, and also phones that use the most advanced Snapdragon chip, as quoted by us from The Verge, Monday (28/3/2022).