It allows privacy protection for the installer of the Frog sensor, as it will not be possible for someone to precisely determine the location of the sensor. It is important to do this on the device so that when users are sharing console logs, etc in Discord, there is no chance of data leakage accidentally revealing their location.
Another advantage to "snapping" sensor locations to a 0.01 degree (or whatever level of precision) grid, is that we won't have to see location drift as the GPS quality changes over time.
For some context about spatial resolution and location precision, NOAA's High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model which is used to make those smoke maps you may have seen, is at 3 km spatial resolution. Another high resolution data product is NASA/ORNL's DayMet which is 1 km spatial resolution. To get 1 kilometer spatial resolution, that is about 0.01 degrees of precision.
This change is to round the latitude and longitude coordinates to 0.01 degrees or precision (2 decimal places)
In previous versions of the Frog sensor we discussed and implemented a simple algorithm to obfuscate the GPS Lat/Long coordinates on the device. See this previous issue more details and discussion.
This has two big benefits:
For some context about spatial resolution and location precision, NOAA's High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model which is used to make those smoke maps you may have seen, is at 3 km spatial resolution. Another high resolution data product is NASA/ORNL's DayMet which is 1 km spatial resolution. To get 1 kilometer spatial resolution, that is about 0.01 degrees of precision.
This change is to round the latitude and longitude coordinates to 0.01 degrees or precision (2 decimal places)