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In an era of unprecedented climate challenges, the need for precise and timely weather forecasting has never been more critical. Accurate weather predictions have evolved from mere convenience to life-saving, helping prevent deaths and economic losses on a massive scale.
The United Nations acknowledges the significantly critical need for early warning systems and aims to ensure the world’s entire population has access to these systems before 2028.
Weather forecasting systems have proven to be cost-effective. They provide a remarkable tenfold return on investment, yet access to them is still limited. Only about 50% of the world’s countries have deployed early warning systems, with even fewer in Small Island Developing States, Least Developed Countries, and Africa.
The exponential advantages
In contrast, the advantages of widespread access to accurate weather forecasts are exponential. Firstly, they empower individuals, businesses, and communities with the knowledge they need to make well-informed decisions, especially in the face of rapidly changing weather patterns driven by climate change. Secondly, they are instrumental in reducing the impact of extreme weather events, thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
While conventional weather forecasting systems have made remarkable progress, artificial intelligence (AI) promises to enable unparalleled accuracy. Startups like Rainbow AI are pioneering this frontier by harnessing the wealth of data from advanced government satellites, such as atmospheric winds, water vapor levels, temperature fluctuations, and cloud cover. This data, often overlooked by traditional models, fuels AI algorithms to discern intricate patterns and make predictions that were once unimaginable.
Unlike the exorbitantly expensive supercomputers that run traditional forecasting systems, AI-driven platforms achieve similar outcomes using a single machine. They deliver more precise and cost-efficient forecasts by rapidly learning from existing data.
Under current global climate conditions, in which every fraction of a degree and minute of warning counts, all weather forecasting improvements offer a beacon of hope. As we strive to protect lives, safeguard economies, and adapt to a rapidly changing climate, embracing new technologies and ideas to enhance weather predictions may be our most powerful tool.
World’s Top Five Weather Apps
- Rainbow AI
Leading the pack is Rainbow AI, a startup whose founders aim to build the Waze app for weather forecasting by getting users globally to leave feedback, where they leave feedback and share their barometer information to create a more exact weather tracker.
“And with our AI models, we will create the best weather service for all users because, as with Waze, our users will understand how crucial their feedback is to help others,” said CEO and Founder Alexander Matveenko.
The founder explained, “With the weather changing so quickly, the only way we can guarantee well is to integrate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for faster and more precise calculations.”
Thus, Rainbow AI is the most revolutionary weather forecast model in existence. It processes data from around 1,000 meteorological radars, about 400,000 weather stations, several satellites, approximately 10,000 user reviews, and millions of barometric values from user mobile devices.
“Rainbow.AI has also recently introduced Storm Alerts and a Hurricane Tracker to take their app to the next level, enabling users to monitor early storm formations, tropical depressions, and hurricanes on an interactive map,” Matveenko said.
He said his team is committed to extending its forecasting window from one hour to 16 hours. With over 400,000 app downloads and 50,000 active users worldwide, Rainbow’s ultimate goal is to reach a billion users as soon as possible.
2. Accuweather
AccuWeather is a free weather forecast app. It provides one of the best, most relevant, and precise weather forecasts for locations worldwide. It comes with special weather features depending on the users’ location.
With its proven digital competence and innovation with leadership in the weather category, Accuweather is today considered one of the most reliable weather apps. It is uniquely built to provide an optimal user experience.
The app provides a fantastic location management feature while boasting enhanced performance on effective radar and satellite animation. It also gives an extraordinary breaking weather and trending video content experience.
Furthermore, Accuweather has a signature feature it calls the MinuteCast. It provides minute-by-minute precipitation type and intensity forecasts for the following two hours. And the new design for AccuWeather’s “follow-me” widget gives easy access to much weather information on the go.
The app gives users live weather 24/7. It allows them to check for a precise weather forecast every minute. Users can check the forecast up to 15 days in advance. It also provides current weather conditions with its data.
3. YR (by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute)
Designed by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, the YR app offers incredibly detailed hour-by-hour and week-long forecasts for users globally. The app allows users to save several locations they would like to have so they can reference them whenever they wish.
YR provides a list view of the week ahead, and a handy feature is the charted hourly projecting it provides, illustrating the sunrise and sunset over the day along with the direction and speed of the winds, temperature, and expected precipitation levels by the hour.
It has a built-in chart that provides users with a map view and other information such as humidity, UV percentage, wind direction and speed, and cloud cover.
On Yr, you will find weather forecasts ten days in advance for up to 13 million locations globally. How the forecasts are made and how often they are updated is location-dependent. The common feature is that a weather model creates all estimates and is post-processed before users see them on Yr.
YR uses several advanced statistical methods to correct known errors and weaknesses in its predictive models, making it capable of producing even more local forecasts than the grid reveals.
For live precipitation forecasts, Yr uses radar data to calculate where they are expected. The live forecast is updated every five minutes. The YR temperature forecasts are updated every hour using data from private weather stations to get as good a temperature forecast as possible.
4. MetOffice
The Met Office weather app claims it gives users the most accurate world-leading global weather forecasts, with coverage from one hour to seven days in advance.
The Met Office app uses user location information to give them the most accurate and localised weather forecast possible.
The Met Office works with supercomputers to make their forecasts, and they consider three critical stages to produce a weather prediction: Knowledge of what the weather is doing presently, calculation of how that will change in the future, and using meteorological expertise to refine the details.
To have a more precise knowledge of what the weather will do in the future, the Met Office first needs to know what it is doing as accurately as possible. Recordings of weather variables are made 24 hours a day across the globe. These are passed to the world’s major weather forecasting centres and used with satellite pictures to see what the atmosphere is doing now. These are called observations.
The weather forecasting centers have giant supercomputers, which use these observations as ‘starting conditions’ for very complex equations that can predict where the weather will move and how it will evolve as time goes on.
The computer models are run several times a day, and meteorologists work around the clock to check that the forecast is going to plan. If it is not, they will amend any predictions going out to users so they can decide with a higher precision level how to prepare for the outdoors.
Winner of two awards in the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) International Weather app awards 2020 for specialised app/ weather warnings and public weather forecasts, including usefulness, reliability, quantity, and quality of information.
5. Weather (by Apple)
Weather is a weather forecast app developed by Apple and has been available on iOS since 2007. It allows users to view conditions, forecasts, temperature, and other related weather metrics of the device’s current location and several other places.
The Weather app is also available for the watchOS, although with limited functionality. Weather was made available on more devices across the Apple ecosystem with the releases of iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura, where weather data from Apple was previously only available as a widget or through Siri.
Following the acquisition of the Dark Sky weather app, many features have been rolled into Apple’s own Weather app with the release of iOS 15. Support for Dark Sky was over on January 1, 2023, with users urged to migrate to the Weather app.
Weather allows users to add or remove locations by simply pressing the list icon in the bottom right corner of the application. For each city, the app displays the current, highest, and lowest temperatures, a ten-day forecast, UV index, time of sunrise and sunset, current wind direction and speed, rainfall measurements, current humidity, outdoor visibility range, and barometric pressure.
In some locations, the app displays an air quality report and shows next-hour precipitation when it rains or snows.
iOS 14 introduced support for severe weather warnings, allowing users to receive notifications for government-issued extreme weather events such as tornadoes, flash flooding, strong winds, and snow storms.
Significant benefits to humanity
Remarkable advances in weather forecasts in the last five decades have brought significant benefits to humanity. Accurate predictions save many lives, and early warnings mitigate the worst effects of extreme weather events when available.
There will always be some uncertainty in a weather forecast. This is partly because we have yet to learn the state of the atmosphere precisely, that the numerical models are a simplified description of reality, and that the atmosphere is a chaotic system that is difficult to predict. However, by combining data from several sources and integrating artificial intelligence, weather apps such as Rainbow AI will enhance predictions for the benefit of billions of people worldwide.
