I do not burden you with every single thing that comes down the pike. But I kinda like this one: Country-wide rainfall maps from cellular communication networks Now, everybody knows how to make a rain map: The standard is the functional equivalent to a lot of soup cans and dipsticks. More recently, Doppler radar and look-down satellites (which ultimately get calibrated against the soup cans). But it many places (tropics and Africa in particular) land-based rain gauges are few, and even many 'rich' nations are cutting back. In contrast, cell-phone networks are booming everywhere (they make money...). The paper above tells us how to use inter-tower signal strength for rain measurements. The speed of the thing is also significant here, because if you want to do flood forecasting (and you should), dipstick rain gauges are generally not up to the task. Moral of the story is if you want to do meteorology or ecology or such things, find out what people are already doing (at a profit) and think of a way to repurpose their stuff. It is 'follow the money' but in a good way.
Trivia: a handy rain gauge with a tipping bucket was invented by Christopher Wren when he was not busy being an architect. Wren also did some other sciency things and Isaac Newton thought he was OK. Significant because Newton that that almost everybody was an a hole. (can I say that here?)
Thanks for the link. The NWS coop observers are probably more widely known NWS Cooperative Observer Program
