Transitioning from fall to winter often brings wild temperature swings, where it may feel like winter in the morning and summer in the afternoon. Whether weather impacts your daily personal decisions such as simply what to wear, or business decisions like how the weather impacts utilities, people often find themselves searching for the most accurate...
ForecastAdvisor , a service of Innovations, has recently been discussed in several blogs and podcasts for its innovative contribution toward people’s decision-making regarding weather applications. The site allows you to input any zip code in the United States, or browse for a location, and returns a list of the weather providers that have been the...
Weather applications on smartphones have various issues, most notably, they attempt to take a vast amount of data that express probabilities and ranges of what is going to happen in the atmosphere on all different scales and many different height and reduce that to one single number or weather icon that anyone in the general...
“That is when we reach the limits of understanding the phenomena, especially in extreme weather such as tornadoes, heatwaves, floods and snowfall,” says Floehr. If machines in such chaotic systems recognize patterns that humans do not understand, it might even save lives, says Floehr: “Conventional models tend to smooth out extremes”. Read more…
To actually find the best weather service for where you live, try ForecastAdvisor, a gem of a site we covered way, way back in 2006. I didn’t know the site existed until I stumbled across it yesterday when researching Dark Sky alternatives, and it’s useful enough for your everyday life to warrant its own special callout. Read more…....
Eric Floehr, founder of ForecastWatch, tells Mic that each app gets its forecast from different places, utilizing different prediction models and relying on different meteorologists to interpret the data. “The big weather apps like AccuWeather, The Weather Channel and Dark Sky all create their own forecasts,” Floehr explains. Some of those services also sell their forecasts, which...
It’s not that easy to track down just where some apps get their weather data from. “What I would suggest is that, if you have an app, ask them where they get their forecasts from or look in the about page and see how they’re getting their forecasts,” said Eric Floehr, founder of ForecastWatch, which analyzes...
“It’s not only easier to collect massive amounts of data more and more quickly and run models on that data, it’s easy to disseminate the results quickly,” says Eric Floehr, the 49-year-old founder and CEO of ForecastWatch in Dublin, Ohio, regarded as the J.D. Power of weather prediction. “There is just more experimentation.” Read more…
Between an organization’s own data and that supplied by ForecastWatch, weather services and other clients have a wealth of data on hand to measure forecast accuracy and quality. The data on hand serves as the base for conducting analytics for a number of use cases, including making strategic decisions such as which weather tools to...
Despite the improvement in the science of weather forecasting, people still have a relatively poor understanding of weather forecasts, including misconceptions about the level of accuracy, Floehr says. That’s why he created ForecastWatch: to help businesspeople connect the dots between the available weather forecasts, the impacts it has on people, and what that means for...
