Your Smartphone Can Predict The Weather Even More Accurately Than Satellites

Ravi Adwani - May 06, 2019

A startup named ClimaCell can do better weather forecast than the current systems of satellites and ground-based units, using just your smartphone.

The traditional weather forecast system

Nowadays, weather forecasting has been a very familiar thing we get to see every day on TV. From the moment when it first appeared on television up until now, there haven’t been many changes for the last few decades. Governments have satellites and necessary systems on the ground to record and monitor changes in weather. Such systems can record weather patterns around the world and then use them to predict the weather in the future.

Weather Forecast - Smartphone? — How often do you see the weather forecast on TV? For most people, probably every day

However, in an era of booming Internet and technology, there’s a startup with a better approach to this. They can also predict the weather, even more accurately, using only a smartphone. The startup we’re talking about is ClimaCell, which was founded in 2015 in Boston.

Predicting the weather in ClimaCell way

In ClimaCell, they don’t need a system of satellites or complex series of systems whatsoever. The guys here can predict the weather with your phone, using the wireless signals as a measurement tool. As a matter of fact, it’s not just how simple they measure it, it’s the accuracy that matters. ClimaCell claims their results to be 60 percent more correct than the present methods we’re using now.

Instead of setting up satellites to detect weather conditions across the globe, ClimaCell records incoming signals to their smartphone and evaluates their quality. Such quality may vary from place to place due to objective factors like air quality, precipitation or cloud cover.

In summary

Seemingly, ClimaCell claims their method of weather measurement to be superior to current approaches with radar signals in use, in terms of accuracy. In additional, ClimaCell takes advantage of the vast network among active devices around the world. The data from this network is reliable and always functions well. This lets them collect data from a much broader range, hence allowing them to gain much more accurate results.

For example, the company says that there are about 12,000 weather apparatus around the world, including satellites, radar, and weather stations. On the other hand, there are currently more than 567,000,000 million additional wireless devices worldwide for helping detect the weather, and the number is growing.