The creators of Dark Sky, who sold their popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, are back with a new take on weather forecasting. The team recently announced the launch of their new app, Acme Weather, which they claim offers a better and more reliable forecast than the one they had at Dark Sky. The app will also offer a range of unique weather notifications, including fun ones like alerts about rainbows and beautiful sunsets.
Unlike typical weather apps, Acme Weather’s forecast is supplemented with a range of alternate predictions for better accuracy.
Image Credits:Acme Weather
Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman explains in an introductory blog post that the app’s homegrown forecasts will leverage different numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data, making its forecast fairly reliable.
However, the app will also feature additional forecast lines that show the other possible outcomes as gray lines on its graphs.
Image Credits:Acme Weather
“Forecasts are often wrong — it’s the weather, right? It’s one of the hardest things to predict,” Grossman told TechCrunch via a telephone interview. “And our biggest pet peeve with a lot of weather apps is you just get their best guess, and you don’t know how certain they are.”
Having an understanding of the alternatives helps people plan for big events, he noted.
“I find it most useful for winter storms, where, maybe the storm starts out in the morning, and you’re going to get snow, but maybe there’s also a possibility it holds out a little bit later — to the afternoon — in which case it’s rain,” Gross explained. “Being able to just see that right there on the timeline just gives you this intuitive sense of whether, do all the models agree, and you’re getting snow? Or do half of them say snow and half of them say rain?”,” he says.”
This type of weather data could make for a valuable product, not just for consumers, but for other developers, too.
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