IBM Wants to Use Your Data to Create Hyper-Accurate Weather Forecasts

IBM on Tuesday unveiled a global weather modeling system that will combine data from smartphones and aircraft to produce what it says will be hyper-accurate local forecasts.
The system, called the IBM Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System, or GRAF, will create a one-day forecast updating every hour at a resolution of 3 kilometers, or about 1.9 miles — a notable upgrade for many parts of the world. The company is pitching GRAF as particularly useful in industries that depend on accurate short-term weather forecasting, like agriculture and transportation, and especially in developing nations with less sophisticated meteorological infrastructure.
“This is the first introduction of crowdsourced data, and to me, it’s really opening a new era equivalent to what happened when we got satellite data in the 1980s,” says Mary Glackin, VP of Weather Business Solutions at IBM. “Cell phone pressures are the start of this, but one could imagine data coming off of vehicles, smart buildings, even wearables doing into the future.”

GRAF forecasts will be created in part with location and atmospheric pressure data collected from smartphones running The Weather Channel app. (IBM acquired that app along with the rest of The Weather Company, minus the TV channel, in 2016.) That data collection will be opt-in, meaning IBM is betting that at least some of the world’s approximately 2.5 billion smartphone users will be willing to share with it ...

Source: TIME: Science - January 8, 2019 Category: Science Authors: Alex Fitzpatrick Tags: Uncategorized CES 2018 onetime Source Type: news