Imagine, you are a passionate camper who loves to spend holidays and spare time in harmony with nature. You are at a campground enjoying the time and the peaceful place unaware of a thunderstorm raging beyond the horizon. Wouldn’t it be useful to have an individual warning system that enables you not just to react swiftly but to decide on safety precautions well in advance?
A solution could be provided by a smart warning system for extreme weather. The basis would be a network of sensors installed in the landscape sending meteorological data of the region to a cloud based service, where it will be complemented by supra-regional data provided by satellites or weather stations. All data will be analyzed by weather forecasting models, creating region-specific, time and position precise weather forecasts, which can be looked-up via Smartphone App.
What is the benefit doing of this with NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT)? The main benefits are extended range and low device and infrastructure costs, enabling the establishment of a broad and cost-efficient sensor network for the collection of reliable data. In addition to that an NB-IoT connection is low-priced for network operators compared to traditional network standards, resulting in much lower cost for the overall service.
Smart weather forecast via NB-IoT is still a vision of the future, but might help some day to predict extreme weather more precisely.