An umbrella as mobile rain gauge

Researchers Rolf Hut, Stijn de Jong and Nick van de Giesen (CiTG) plans to turn our umbrellas into rain gauges. The prototype was introduced at the recent European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly.

The prototype smart brolly has a sensor that detects raindrops falling on its canvas, and uses bluetooth to send this information via a phone to a computer.

The related BBC story explains that although water management and hydrology scientists would be able to collect data using this innovative crowdsourcing data, replacing the scientific gauges whose numbers are declining due to high maintenance costs.

"We would then have hundreds of rain gauges moving along a cityscape and that could greatly improve our ability to understand urban hydrology; it would greatly improve our ability to predict urban flooding and take measures when things are going bad," told Rolf Hut, from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands in an interview with the BBC.