What's the weather like in your place?

Is the weather forecast accurate?

To tell you the truth, it's not accurate. Sometimes it's even more accurate to understand. However, this can not blame the meteorological observatory, because the climate this thing is too complex. In addition, localization is not enough, as long as the place to live a little bigger people should have this experience, sometimes just a few street, sunny becomes rainy day-the so-called East Sunrise West rain.

Then someone thought of the weather forecast through crowdsourcing. Sunshine This app combines the U.S. Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data with the smartphone's barometric readings for weather forecasts. Currently, like the latest iphone and some Android phones are equipped with barometers, these sensors are often used in navigation to determine elevation, but the change in air pressure can also be a sign of climate change. Sunshine the data from the sensors on the user's phone to help with the weather forecast.

Although there are some weather forecasts app provides the user feedback mechanism, but that is to rely on the user manually input, may not guarantee the participation degree. and sunshine collection of pressure data is mobile phone backstage, relatively, this crowdsourcing mechanism of course, the effect will be better. And for some sudden weather disasters, such as dense fog, sunshine also rely on users to report.

But this crowdsourcing mechanism must have enough people to participate in order to ensure accuracy, according to Sunshine's experiment, there should be at least 3 people per square mile, so the weather forecast can be higher than the accuracy of the present. According to Rachel Metz's trial experience, she now receives data from local 37 devices. But there is not enough data to be available, according to weather experts, which must be combined with climate data models to predict.

Sunhine is still in the private beta phase, with about 250 people in the Bay Area, New York and Dallas, and plans to release the iphone at the end of March. App Basics will be free, but some additional functionality may be charged in the future. In addition, the sunhine is only using numerical models to predict the future, in order to improve the scientific nature of the prediction, the start-up company plans to recruit meteorological experts to improve the model.