You may have noticed a drop of AI in your weather app lately. As companies race to infuse artificial intelligence into every product, the wave has come for the humble weather app.
The Weather Company, operator of the Weather Channel, today released a revamped version of its Storm Radar app, featuring an AI-powered Weather Assistant that lets users customize how they view forecasts and weather maps, toggling between layers like radar, temperature, and weather conditions like wind and lightning. It can also sync with other apps, like your calendar, to send text notifications and weather summaries that tie info about the upcoming weather into your daily plans.
“Everyone has their idea of what they want in a weather app, what data they're interested in, how they're interested in it being presented,” says Adam Grossman, a founder of the DarkSky app. “How do you build a single weather app that works for everybody?”
No matter how good your forecast is, you're going to be wrong, as Joe Koval from The Weather Company points out. But AI can help: “Machine learning is probably the biggest change to weather forecasting in a while,” he says.
The push of using AI in weather apps comes in an era where the government has dismantled NOAA and other federal efforts to track and measure weather patterns, leaving parts of the job of data collection to private companies. Weather systems also have a harder time predicting extreme weather events and climate disasters, which are growing ever more frequent.







