Locally crowdsourced weather notifications to improve model accuracy

The weather is sometimes extremely localized: it might be snowing where you are, but two blocks away it might be sunny. This level of granularity is rarely captured by weather forecasts, since obtaining such high-resolution data and making forecasts at this micro scale is extremely difficult.

I’m hoping to solve this problem with pressureNET, and we’ve just shipped a new feature that I’m really excited about. We’ve improved our current conditions feature by adding a new widget to quickly submit current conditions as well as a notification if someone nearby reports a condition.

Nearby snowWeather over North AmericaNearby snow notification

You’ll get an alert about the nearby weather and will be prompted to report what’s it like outside where you are. We’ll combine this data with our live stream of atmospheric pressure data to create very high-resolution, personalized weather forecasts that are validated against reality. This will take us some time, so for now, enjoy looking at the map and watching the weather change block-by-block in your city (if enough people contribute)!

Soon we’ll add a feature to show animations of these conditions over time – it’ll be really cool to watch storms roll across cities, and this data will help validate the forecasts we build.

2 thoughts on “Locally crowdsourced weather notifications to improve model accuracy

  1. Are you thinking of making it a waze type of app where users have avatars and are awarded pts based on their contributions? Could be cool also if people could take photos of the sky and share or have some algorithm that measures the color levels to estimate cloud cover.
    I think itll be a hit, especially in san francisco, if done properly. I would love to be updated on your progress. Feel free to add me to your mailing list if you have one.

  2. I like this points idea. I’ve been getting prompts for just two days and I’m already sick of it … I actually found this page by trying to search for what in the hell kept asking me for weather updates (the little twitter icon threw me off, but my leading suspecion was actually Android/Google itself) …

    If you can come up with some clever way to make it a game of sorts, I for one would be a lot more interested in submitting updates!

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