#5 Small Scale Action | Jelgava Local Municipality, Latvia

During the Urbact Local Group’s meetings and focus group interviews for the selection of a Small-Scale Action (SSA) under the project “Internet of Things as policy instrument for the city change”, the Jelgava Local Municipality came to a decision to boost district level meteo data monitoring for the purpose of data importance, validation with farmers, stakeholders and proper visualization to its inhabitants.

The Municipality conducted the placement of 4 stations located at the central part of Municipality at farm premises with joint IoT tech connection, 3 out of 4 will transfer raw data, where station No.4 will catch and analyze possible slips from the Latvian Environment, Geology & Meteorology Centre (LVĢMC) certified meteo station, which allows to validate data match with official state measurements. 5 different data flows are selected – air temperature, soil humidity, rainfall, wind speed and wind direction. All sensors will gather data at 2 and 10 m high levels, which is considered as proof of concept for the data validation of wind ground speed and direction from the perspective of different heights - as this is important for farm management of plant protection if they want to continue to use 2 m high sensor data comparing to official limitation of min of 10 m.

Pilot project was organised with three test partners and external vendor for technology. During the test project various improvements were done to reach intended quality of the result. The plan is to integrate 24h meteo data on-site visualization at the Municipality official website to inform society about the present weather conditions between July 2021 – July, 2022 and further on if the pilot project will be evaluated as success – to continue to add more stations on the map and even transfer data to LVĢMC in order to get more precise meteo information in future.

These tests will allow us to continue the discussion on how smaller weather data stations can be used to improve decision-making in agriculture as well as give awareness to all municipality citizens about the specific weather conditions.

"Pilot findings may provide valuable info for us, as a Municipality, and other local and national stakeholders." Ilze Vītola, Jelgava Local Municipality Vice-Chair

Check out the video prepared by Jelgava Local Municipality available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/UXy7-eCmErY