15 ms·

IBM to Acquire the Weather Company

306 points by ISL 11y ago

swanson 11y ago
Hell, if Watson needs some weather data -- I offer the most precise weather forecasts already: http://mostpreciseweather.com/ http://mostpreciseweather.com/ Just send me a check.
- lentil 11y ago
  Just an FYI, that page is broken for me. JS error of: "Failed to load resource: Could not connect to the server."
  - swanson 11y ago
    Doh - thanks. Looks like the geoip library I was using has moved. Fixed now for all your critical precision weather needs ;)
- callumjones 11y ago
  http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js no longer exists (at least the domain j.maxmind.com)
- smt88 11y ago
  Who cares about precise? We want accurate weather forecasts, which (as far as I've heard meteorologists say) is pretty much impossible for much of the world. Weather is just not very predictable yet.
  - swanson 11y ago
    Hi, it's a joke. :)
Alex3917 11y ago
Hopefully IBM can fix the weather data industry. It seems ridiculously broken right now that if I want to get a "prediction" of how much it's going to rain next week there are a million free sources, but if I want to see how much it actually rained in the past week then I need to pay thousands of dollars or else figure out how to parse a bunch of obscure and undocumented formats.
- huhtenberg 11y ago
  Wolfram|Alpha has the data you are looking for.
  - feider 11y ago
    ...and operates like North Korea when it comes to openness.
- jonknee 11y ago
  Wunderground has lots of data available. They may have actually been part of this deal as they were owned by The Weather Channel. http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KSFO/2015/10/28/MonthlyCalendar.html?req_city=San%20Francisco&req_state=CA&reqdb.zip=94101&reqdb.magic=1&reqdb.wmo=99999#calendar http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KSFO/2015/10/28/...
  - ISL 11y ago
    International Business Machines on Wednesday announced an agreement to acquire The Weather Co.'s B2B, mobile, and cloud-based web properties, including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand. Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/28/ibm-plans-to-acquire-the-weather-companys-product-and-tech-businesses.html http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/28/ibm-plans-to-acquire-the-weat...
  - hangtime79 11y ago
    Wunderground is included in the deal. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47952.wss http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47952.wss
pbreit 11y ago
I swear I have no idea what IBM does. Anyone know?
- mesozoic 11y ago
  Consulting mostly I think
- jonknee 11y ago
  Win at Jeopardy, star in some commercials, contribute little revenue to IBM's business.
- ngoede 11y ago
  Buy other companies.
- Afforess 11y ago
  IBM is a financial services company that dabbles in tech.
  - vegabook 11y ago
    you're funny. Probably half of the tech you use every day has an IBM enabling technology behind it, thankfully paid for, directly or indirectly, by this "financial services" company. let's not forget that x86 itself could have been a Motorola 68000 if this company had not decided in Intel's favour. That's the extent to which this company defined the computer era. The notebook you're using right now will boot DOS, commissioned by IBM. And I'm not even starting on the fact that almost all programming language roots go back to languages for the IBM 360 mainframes. I'll gloss over the extent to which the architecture of your modern computer is essentially a scaled down version of what was invented by IBM in its mainframe business. Disk? Check. Processor cache? Check. Asynchronous bus? Check. GPU (IBM 8514) check. It's not unfair to say that this company invented modern computing's engineering, and even if it has (very sadly) lost its way, one can hope that some of the culture of well-financed innovation remains, and this Watson business might be one of those.
    - 11y ago
ngoede 11y ago
Having had the fun that is working for a company that gets bought by IBM I wish their workers the best of luck. Hope they enjoy the Blue Washing(TM)
- radiorental 11y ago
  Yes, I wonder how many of those 900 will be replaced by watson?
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  It's said that Sun turned down IBM's buyout bid and went with Oracle because they thought that there'd ultimately be fewer layoffs with Oracle. Of course, no one really knows how things would've played out if IBM had taken over Sun.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    I was an analyst at the time and an IBM acquisition of Sun never made sense to me. The Oracle acquisition did--even if I didn't personally like it for a variety of reasons.
radiorental 11y ago
This is a smart move and obvious application of the Watson engine if it can be applied reliably to the unpredictable 'global weirding' weather problems. Does anyone know if organisations like Home Depot, for example, roll their own solutions or rely on 3rd parties to help move things like generators into stores ahead of storms?
- dubcanada 11y ago
  As far as I know it's 100% up to each store to watch the weather reports and determine the required action.
  - radiorental 11y ago
    Interesting, it was my understanding that HomeDepot HQ move stock around ahead of predicted near term need.
    - waterlesscloud 11y ago
      Waffle House organizes for impending disasters from HQ, and has a mobile command center they'll dispatch to the affected area to help organize logistics. They're famous for staying open and/or recovering quickly from extreme events. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904716604576542460736605364 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119047166045765424...
      - ethbro 11y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index
- hangtime79 11y ago
  I can't speak for Depot, but in the case of some of the larger retail organizations, major weather events will get coordination from HQ, but beyond those its typically left up to regional and store manager discretion.
deeths 11y ago
Funny tweet on this by @Cryo (https://twitter.com/Cryo/status/659369885991088129 https://twitter.com/Cryo/status/659369885991088129): IBM Board meetings notes: "We should buy the Cloud" "What?" "You know, the Cloud" "Why?" "We want to be the biggest" buys weather channel
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- amyjess 11y ago
  This reminds me a "joke" told to me by a friend who works at what used to be Softlayer (and has now been integrated into IBM) to explain why IBM bought Softlayer: "IBM wanted to have a good cloud business, so they bought one".
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - villanuevadani 11y ago
    tu puta madre en patinete
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bostonpete 11y ago
  Except that according to the article, the bought the Weather Company and not the Weather Channel...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nicholas_C 11y ago
    The Weather Company owns the Weather Channel.
cryptoz 11y ago
There has been significant consolidation in the weather industry over the last 10-20 years, and it's a very interesting space right now with smartphones coming online as weather sensors. IBM's acquisition of The Weather Company is the joining of two huge behemoths, I wonder how well they can work together. > The company also has a popular mobile app, which Mr. Kenny said collected barometric pressure from its users’ phone sensors. Millions of locations are turning in information 96 times a day. Fascinating...The new-weather startups like Sunshine and PressureNet are going to be watching this closely. https://thesunshine.co https://thesunshine.co https://pressurenet.io https://pressurenet.io
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
asd 11y ago
Hopefully they'll be able to harness all of this delicious weather data and squirt forecasts to our watches as depicted in BTTF II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI7ctWyXl5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI7ctWyXl5s
baakss 11y ago
Wunderground and weather.com were owned by the same company? For some reason I never would have guessed that just based on my experience on those sites. Wunderground generally feels clean and on-topic. Weather.com is often filled with "Doomsday scenario with newest hurricane season" and "Check out this massive shark jumping" news stories.
- DavidAdams 11y ago
  That, my friend, is known as effective market segmentation.
  - jazzyk 11y ago
    Yup, it is all about giving consumer a "choice".
- rstupek 11y ago
  Prior to being acquired they were a much lighter weight and usable site. Now they are almost as bad as weather.com with ads and unnecessary UI clutter
  - thrownaway2424 11y ago
    I agree. These days the wunderground site drags my 2009 iMac to an almost total standstill. I don't really understand how they screwed it up so bad :-(
- heartbreak 11y ago
  They've been owned by the same company for less than a year, I believe.
  - mikeyouse 11y ago
    > For less than a year now More than that now, I ran into a guy in the Haight wearing a WUnderground fleece about 3 years ago, right after the buyout and told him it was my favorite weather website and that I hoped Weather.com wouldn't ruin it. He then told me he was on the Weather.com team who led the buyout -- Oops. He still offered to send me a WUnderground hoodie though, so kudos to him for having a sense of humor. First article I found re: the buyout in 2012; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/us/as-weather-channel-buys-weather-underground-fans-fear-change.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/us/as-weather-channel-buys...
masterrobot1 11y ago
Interesting. Next they will probably acquire the weather.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
giltleaf 11y ago
This sets up IBM to compete directly with Monsanto's new Climate Corp in the ag-tech space. My hopes is that this drives the entry price of this tech down so it can actually benefit small farmers (who may have higher margins due to crop choice but lower profits due to size and economies of scale) and not just larger agribusiness operating on economies of size. A question: how has the accuracy of weather prediction improved overall?
- sampo 11y ago
  > A question: how has the accuracy of weather prediction improved overall? Here is a recent New York Times article on that topic, with emphasis on hurricane prediction: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/upshot/hurricane-joaquin-forecast-european-model-leads-pack-again.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/upshot/hurricane-joaquin-f... "Over the last few decades, faster computers, superior models and new data have allowed all weather forecasting to improve, by a lot. But the United States hasn’t quite matched that effort. It didn’t invest in computing power and models that kept up with the potential for better forecasts."
  - giltleaf 11y ago
    Thanks!
jdelsman 11y ago
Not sure about anyone else, but this would make me actually want to work for weather.com or wunderground.com.
myth_buster 11y ago
The company also has a popular mobile app, which Mr. Kenny said collected barometric pressure from its users’ phone sensors. Millions of locations are turning in information 96 times a day. Well, this is news to me.
- theseatoms 11y ago
  Does anyone know if it asks for these permissions on install?
  - cryptoz 11y ago
    Specific permission to access the barometer is not required by Apple or Google. The weather app already does ask permission for location services in general, so yes it is already there. Since they have already been tracking your latitude and longitude, the barometer gives altitude as well - along with current atmospheric pressure trends.
    - myth_buster 11y ago
      permission for location services in general This is interesting primarily because for most part I switch-off my location services as I think it's a drain on my battery. The only time it's enabled is when I need the GPS which is quite seldom. So I would assume that it would affect the accuracy of the model if say I live quite a way off from where I work. Also if I'm spending most of my time indoors in buildings, how much of it would affect the readings as compared to when I'm out in the open?
      - cryptoz 11y ago
        > Also if I'm spending most of my time indoors in buildings, how much of it would affect the readings as compared to when I'm out in the open? Indoor vs. outdoor isn't really a problem most of the time - the pressure is basically the same inside and outside. A bigger problem is fast altitude changes, which make the absolute reading from the barometer very difficult to interpret safely. One of the reasons that it took so long for TWC to finally do this is because of the concerns you just voiced: that having this data might actually make the models worse, if they don't take enough care to quality-control it first. A lot of the research done by scientists (like Cliff Mass at the University of Washington) is how to assimilate this data in a reliable and trusted way. It is likely that The Weather Company does not know how to use the exact pressure readings from the barometer yet (nobody does). Instead, they will probably use the trends over time (say 6 hours), because those are more resilient to noise.
acd 11y ago
Weather is a chaotic system, due to it being chaotic and the lorenz attractor maximum three days of weather can be forecasted. "While we can typically predict general weather patterns up to 3 days ahead, predictability for detailed local weather such as rainfall or fog formation is much less." see more here http://research.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/ensemble/concept.html http://research.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/ensemble/conce...
- wensing 11y ago
  Unless your forecast is probabilistic.
- jameshart 11y ago
  If you think IBM may be unaware of the nature and consequences of chaos theory, you might want to look into Benoit Mandelbrot's employment history.
  - sgt101 11y ago
    The thing is, is IBM as a corporate entity unaware of it? I know people who work for IBM who are much smarter than me, and who will always have a high level job as innovators in the IT industry, but they have 0 say in what IBM does, says or wants.
nealrs 11y ago
FYI, if you're interested in USING Weather Company data & building apps with Bluemix, Devpost just launched a new online hackathon all about that (and Spark!) with $30K in prizes. http://sparkathon.devpost.com/ http://sparkathon.devpost.com/
sethd 11y ago
I'm assuming The Weather Channel was left out of the deal to die a slow death on it's own. I wonder if they will launch a new website and set of apps just focused purely on the TV content. You can't have a TV channel without a web presence, right?
skizm 11y ago
Is this the default weather app that comes on ios?
- acomms 11y ago
  Nope - I think this is the one they're referring to: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-channel-weather.com/id295646461?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-channel-weather.com/...
- MBCook 11y ago
  That's built by Apple but it does get it's data from The Weather Channel.
sgt101 11y ago
I had a discussion with some weather forecasters about how we could enhance their datasets with IoT sensors (80k of them over ~200,000km^2. The answer was no enhancement whatsoever. Because they can infer an infinity of points from satellite data (all day every day), calibrated with about 1000 sensors.
sarahh 11y ago
Hope to see improvements in the weather industry.
OutsmartDan 11y ago
Hope they finally fix weather.com.
Hydraulix989 11y ago
I'm confused. WATSON is a specific NLP-based question answering system. [1] How can WATSON help predict the weather? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)

306 points by ISL 11y ago

Hell, if Watson needs some weather data -- I offer the most precise weather forecasts already: http://mostpreciseweather.com/ http://mostpreciseweather.com/ Just send me a check.

lentil 11y ago
Just an FYI, that page is broken for me. JS error of: "Failed to load resource: Could not connect to the server."
- swanson 11y ago
  Doh - thanks. Looks like the geoip library I was using has moved. Fixed now for all your critical precision weather needs ;)
callumjones 11y ago
http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js no longer exists (at least the domain j.maxmind.com)
smt88 11y ago
Who cares about precise? We want accurate weather forecasts, which (as far as I've heard meteorologists say) is pretty much impossible for much of the world. Weather is just not very predictable yet.
- swanson 11y ago
  Hi, it's a joke. :)

Alex3917 11y ago

Hopefully IBM can fix the weather data industry. It seems ridiculously broken right now that if I want to get a "prediction" of how much it's going to rain next week there are a million free sources, but if I want to see how much it actually rained in the past week then I need to pay thousands of dollars or else figure out how to parse a bunch of obscure and undocumented formats.

huhtenberg 11y ago
Wolfram|Alpha has the data you are looking for.
- feider 11y ago
  ...and operates like North Korea when it comes to openness.
jonknee 11y ago
Wunderground has lots of data available. They may have actually been part of this deal as they were owned by The Weather Channel. http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KSFO/2015/10/28/MonthlyCalendar.html?req_city=San%20Francisco&req_state=CA&reqdb.zip=94101&reqdb.magic=1&reqdb.wmo=99999#calendar http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KSFO/2015/10/28/...
- ISL 11y ago
  International Business Machines on Wednesday announced an agreement to acquire The Weather Co.'s B2B, mobile, and cloud-based web properties, including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand. Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/28/ibm-plans-to-acquire-the-weather-companys-product-and-tech-businesses.html http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/28/ibm-plans-to-acquire-the-weat...
- hangtime79 11y ago
  Wunderground is included in the deal. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47952.wss http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47952.wss

pbreit 11y ago

I swear I have no idea what IBM does. Anyone know?

mesozoic 11y ago
Consulting mostly I think
jonknee 11y ago
Win at Jeopardy, star in some commercials, contribute little revenue to IBM's business.
ngoede 11y ago
Buy other companies.
Afforess 11y ago
IBM is a financial services company that dabbles in tech.
- vegabook 11y ago
  you're funny. Probably half of the tech you use every day has an IBM enabling technology behind it, thankfully paid for, directly or indirectly, by this "financial services" company. let's not forget that x86 itself could have been a Motorola 68000 if this company had not decided in Intel's favour. That's the extent to which this company defined the computer era. The notebook you're using right now will boot DOS, commissioned by IBM. And I'm not even starting on the fact that almost all programming language roots go back to languages for the IBM 360 mainframes. I'll gloss over the extent to which the architecture of your modern computer is essentially a scaled down version of what was invented by IBM in its mainframe business. Disk? Check. Processor cache? Check. Asynchronous bus? Check. GPU (IBM 8514) check. It's not unfair to say that this company invented modern computing's engineering, and even if it has (very sadly) lost its way, one can hope that some of the culture of well-financed innovation remains, and this Watson business might be one of those.
  - 11y ago

ngoede 11y ago

Having had the fun that is working for a company that gets bought by IBM I wish their workers the best of luck. Hope they enjoy the Blue Washing(TM)

radiorental 11y ago
Yes, I wonder how many of those 900 will be replaced by watson?
cookiecaper 11y ago
It's said that Sun turned down IBM's buyout bid and went with Oracle because they thought that there'd ultimately be fewer layoffs with Oracle. Of course, no one really knows how things would've played out if IBM had taken over Sun.
- ghaff 11y ago
  I was an analyst at the time and an IBM acquisition of Sun never made sense to me. The Oracle acquisition did--even if I didn't personally like it for a variety of reasons.

radiorental 11y ago

This is a smart move and obvious application of the Watson engine if it can be applied reliably to the unpredictable 'global weirding' weather problems. Does anyone know if organisations like Home Depot, for example, roll their own solutions or rely on 3rd parties to help move things like generators into stores ahead of storms?

dubcanada 11y ago
As far as I know it's 100% up to each store to watch the weather reports and determine the required action.
- radiorental 11y ago
  Interesting, it was my understanding that HomeDepot HQ move stock around ahead of predicted near term need.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    Waffle House organizes for impending disasters from HQ, and has a mobile command center they'll dispatch to the affected area to help organize logistics. They're famous for staying open and/or recovering quickly from extreme events. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904716604576542460736605364 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119047166045765424...
    - ethbro 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index
hangtime79 11y ago
I can't speak for Depot, but in the case of some of the larger retail organizations, major weather events will get coordination from HQ, but beyond those its typically left up to regional and store manager discretion.

deeths 11y ago

Funny tweet on this by @Cryo (https://twitter.com/Cryo/status/659369885991088129 https://twitter.com/Cryo/status/659369885991088129): IBM Board meetings notes: "We should buy the Cloud" "What?" "You know, the Cloud" "Why?" "We want to be the biggest" buys weather channel

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
amyjess 11y ago
This reminds me a "joke" told to me by a friend who works at what used to be Softlayer (and has now been integrated into IBM) to explain why IBM bought Softlayer: "IBM wanted to have a good cloud business, so they bought one".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- villanuevadani 11y ago
  tu puta madre en patinete
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bostonpete 11y ago
Except that according to the article, the bought the Weather Company and not the Weather Channel...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Nicholas_C 11y ago
  The Weather Company owns the Weather Channel.

cryptoz 11y ago

There has been significant consolidation in the weather industry over the last 10-20 years, and it's a very interesting space right now with smartphones coming online as weather sensors. IBM's acquisition of The Weather Company is the joining of two huge behemoths, I wonder how well they can work together. > The company also has a popular mobile app, which Mr. Kenny said collected barometric pressure from its users’ phone sensors. Millions of locations are turning in information 96 times a day. Fascinating...The new-weather startups like Sunshine and PressureNet are going to be watching this closely. https://thesunshine.co https://thesunshine.co https://pressurenet.io https://pressurenet.io

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

asd 11y ago

Hopefully they'll be able to harness all of this delicious weather data and squirt forecasts to our watches as depicted in BTTF II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI7ctWyXl5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI7ctWyXl5s

baakss 11y ago

Wunderground and weather.com were owned by the same company? For some reason I never would have guessed that just based on my experience on those sites. Wunderground generally feels clean and on-topic. Weather.com is often filled with "Doomsday scenario with newest hurricane season" and "Check out this massive shark jumping" news stories.

DavidAdams 11y ago
That, my friend, is known as effective market segmentation.
- jazzyk 11y ago
  Yup, it is all about giving consumer a "choice".
rstupek 11y ago
Prior to being acquired they were a much lighter weight and usable site. Now they are almost as bad as weather.com with ads and unnecessary UI clutter
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  I agree. These days the wunderground site drags my 2009 iMac to an almost total standstill. I don't really understand how they screwed it up so bad :-(
heartbreak 11y ago
They've been owned by the same company for less than a year, I believe.
- mikeyouse 11y ago
  > For less than a year now More than that now, I ran into a guy in the Haight wearing a WUnderground fleece about 3 years ago, right after the buyout and told him it was my favorite weather website and that I hoped Weather.com wouldn't ruin it. He then told me he was on the Weather.com team who led the buyout -- Oops. He still offered to send me a WUnderground hoodie though, so kudos to him for having a sense of humor. First article I found re: the buyout in 2012; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/us/as-weather-channel-buys-weather-underground-fans-fear-change.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/us/as-weather-channel-buys...

masterrobot1 11y ago

Interesting. Next they will probably acquire the weather.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

giltleaf 11y ago

This sets up IBM to compete directly with Monsanto's new Climate Corp in the ag-tech space. My hopes is that this drives the entry price of this tech down so it can actually benefit small farmers (who may have higher margins due to crop choice but lower profits due to size and economies of scale) and not just larger agribusiness operating on economies of size. A question: how has the accuracy of weather prediction improved overall?

sampo 11y ago
> A question: how has the accuracy of weather prediction improved overall? Here is a recent New York Times article on that topic, with emphasis on hurricane prediction: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/upshot/hurricane-joaquin-forecast-european-model-leads-pack-again.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/upshot/hurricane-joaquin-f... "Over the last few decades, faster computers, superior models and new data have allowed all weather forecasting to improve, by a lot. But the United States hasn’t quite matched that effort. It didn’t invest in computing power and models that kept up with the potential for better forecasts."
- giltleaf 11y ago
  Thanks!

jdelsman 11y ago

Not sure about anyone else, but this would make me actually want to work for weather.com or wunderground.com.

myth_buster 11y ago

The company also has a popular mobile app, which Mr. Kenny said collected barometric pressure from its users’ phone sensors. Millions of locations are turning in information 96 times a day. Well, this is news to me.

theseatoms 11y ago
Does anyone know if it asks for these permissions on install?
- cryptoz 11y ago
  Specific permission to access the barometer is not required by Apple or Google. The weather app already does ask permission for location services in general, so yes it is already there. Since they have already been tracking your latitude and longitude, the barometer gives altitude as well - along with current atmospheric pressure trends.
  - myth_buster 11y ago
    permission for location services in general This is interesting primarily because for most part I switch-off my location services as I think it's a drain on my battery. The only time it's enabled is when I need the GPS which is quite seldom. So I would assume that it would affect the accuracy of the model if say I live quite a way off from where I work. Also if I'm spending most of my time indoors in buildings, how much of it would affect the readings as compared to when I'm out in the open?
    - cryptoz 11y ago
      > Also if I'm spending most of my time indoors in buildings, how much of it would affect the readings as compared to when I'm out in the open? Indoor vs. outdoor isn't really a problem most of the time - the pressure is basically the same inside and outside. A bigger problem is fast altitude changes, which make the absolute reading from the barometer very difficult to interpret safely. One of the reasons that it took so long for TWC to finally do this is because of the concerns you just voiced: that having this data might actually make the models worse, if they don't take enough care to quality-control it first. A lot of the research done by scientists (like Cliff Mass at the University of Washington) is how to assimilate this data in a reliable and trusted way. It is likely that The Weather Company does not know how to use the exact pressure readings from the barometer yet (nobody does). Instead, they will probably use the trends over time (say 6 hours), because those are more resilient to noise.

acd 11y ago

Weather is a chaotic system, due to it being chaotic and the lorenz attractor maximum three days of weather can be forecasted. "While we can typically predict general weather patterns up to 3 days ahead, predictability for detailed local weather such as rainfall or fog formation is much less." see more here http://research.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/ensemble/concept.html http://research.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/ensemble/conce...

wensing 11y ago
Unless your forecast is probabilistic.
jameshart 11y ago
If you think IBM may be unaware of the nature and consequences of chaos theory, you might want to look into Benoit Mandelbrot's employment history.
- sgt101 11y ago
  The thing is, is IBM as a corporate entity unaware of it? I know people who work for IBM who are much smarter than me, and who will always have a high level job as innovators in the IT industry, but they have 0 say in what IBM does, says or wants.

nealrs 11y ago

FYI, if you're interested in USING Weather Company data & building apps with Bluemix, Devpost just launched a new online hackathon all about that (and Spark!) with $30K in prizes. http://sparkathon.devpost.com/ http://sparkathon.devpost.com/

sethd 11y ago

I'm assuming The Weather Channel was left out of the deal to die a slow death on it's own. I wonder if they will launch a new website and set of apps just focused purely on the TV content. You can't have a TV channel without a web presence, right?

skizm 11y ago

Is this the default weather app that comes on ios?

acomms 11y ago
Nope - I think this is the one they're referring to: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-channel-weather.com/id295646461?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-channel-weather.com/...
MBCook 11y ago
That's built by Apple but it does get it's data from The Weather Channel.

sgt101 11y ago

I had a discussion with some weather forecasters about how we could enhance their datasets with IoT sensors (80k of them over ~200,000km^2. The answer was no enhancement whatsoever. Because they can infer an infinity of points from satellite data (all day every day), calibrated with about 1000 sensors.

sarahh 11y ago

Hope to see improvements in the weather industry.

OutsmartDan 11y ago

Hope they finally fix weather.com.

Hydraulix989 11y ago

I'm confused. WATSON is a specific NLP-based question answering system. [1] How can WATSON help predict the weather? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)