Do Weather Apps Deserve the Hate? - Galaxy Brain Podcast by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic
Weather apps are the perfect example of big data that everyone can use and see daily, why do they get it wrong so often?
How are we still getting caught in the rain? This week’s “Galaxy Brain” explores the world of weather forecasting—specifically the apps on our phones that we have come to rely on. As climate change intensifies storms and smartphones put hyper-local forecasts in our pockets, we’ve never had more meteorological data. And yet plenty of people lament that their weather apps can’t get it right. Charlie digs into why we obsessively refresh our weather apps, why we blame them when they’re wrong, and what it really means to forecast an inherently chaotic atmosphere.
Charlie talks with the physicist Adam Grossman, a co-creator of the cult-favorite weather app Dark Sky that redefined minute-by-minute forecasting before being acquired by Apple. Grossman pulls back the curtain on how weather predictions are made—a process that includes government satellites, weather balloons, massive physics simulations, and machine-learning models—and explains why forecasts are improving even if it doesn’t always feel that way.
