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Tech

Sunshine Wants You and Everyone Around You to Be the Weatherman

Sunshine asks you and everyone else to be the weatherman.
Image: Sunshine

There's a big hole in weather forecasting nowadays: none of them really ask the guy on the street how it's feeling outside. And that untapped avenue is the target for Sunshine, a mobile weather app released last week on the iOS App Store.

Unlike a traditional weather app, Sunshine shows you a local street map with crowdsourced sky reports shown from people directly on the street. They show up on the app as little icons, pinned exactly to wherever they reported the weather. While street-level weather reporting isn't new—Weather Underground and weather app Weddar can also do this—this is the first app to actually show its users, pseudonymously or anonymously, on the map.

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More numbers don't mean better accuracy," Sunshine CEO Katerina Stroponiati told me. "It's weather based on your comfort zone, for the places you care about, like your home and office."

The app has also made weather reporting into something of a game—the more you report, the more heft your data will have in future and current predictions. You gain rankings the more you check in. It's all fun and games and data, in a simplified format that balks at the idea of having more and more data to comb through. And moreover, forecasts for the near future are based on historical conditions and user-generated reports.

"We keep track of our own predictions, user-reported conditions and actual conditions. When the forecast runs [through] again, our models take into account the above factors and adjust the prediction," Stroponiati said.

The only fundamental flaw I see in Sunshine is that it hinges on actual users being present to work well. Stroponiati told me that the app prods users in low-density areas to invite friends, who will inevitably get drawn into tapping the sun button and being a little weatherman in a sea of big data.

Traditional weather forecasts, despite being filled with enough big data to parse through, are sometimes just completely wrong—18 percent of the National Weather Service's precipitation reports ended up incorrect, and that number can be higher or lower depending on what you're trying to predict. And that's not just because weather is capricious, it's also because those predictions frequently rely on averaging out surface observation systems and satellite imagery (the majority of which is owned by the government and marketed to you in different flavors), to get a big, mean average that we collectively accept as the Weather For Today.

But as to whether or not the accuracy of current forecasting models would benefit from asking strangers what's the sky looking—well, we'll see how this plays out through the passage of time.

This story has been updated to reflect that Sunshine was not the first crowdsourced weather app, though it was the first to gamify the activity.