uWx-Weather

About uWx-Weather Android App

Overview

Designed by atmospheric scientists at the University of Washington, uWx is a pressure app that crowd-sources anonymous pressures from your smartphone to improve weather forecasts.

App Features

• Hiking Altimeter:
Use your barometer as an altimeter. Track your pressure and elevation as you hike.

• Current Weather:
Get a real-time look at a variety of meteorological variables from temperature, wind, and pressure too humidity, cloud cover, and precip.

• Worldwide Weather:
Wondering what the weather is like in Antarctica, Havana, or Beijing? uWx can tell you! Easily search for weather forecasts and current conditions at any location on the planet.

• Global Climatology:
Planning a quick getaway or a family vacation? Discover which months of the year are ideal for travel by taking a look at our monthly climatologies.

• Real-time Weather Maps:
View high resolution radar and satellite data at the touch of your finger.

• Crowd-sourced Pressures:
Take a look at crowd-sourced pressures collected by your phone. Calibrate your barometer and learn about sensor bias. View real-time pressure measurements at the home screen.

Our Research

When weather models are run observations are used to constrain and adjust the forecasts they produce so that ultimately model forecasts are closer to reality. The more observations that are used to constrain and adjust weather models the better the forecasts tend to be. At present there are several thousand surface weather stations that actively contribute observations to weather models within the US. We estimate that there are well over 100 million smartphones (in the US alone) capable of crowd-sourcing atmospheric pressure. Crowd-sourced pressure observations from a small fraction of these phones could substantially improve the density and temporal frequency of weather observations across the US. By incorporating crowd-sourced pressures into weather models we hypothesize that improvements in short-term weather forecasts could be achieved. By downloading uWx you can help us test this hypothesis and become a part of the first-generation of mobile weather observing networks!

The Science Behind The App

Check out these publications to learn more about how crowd-sourced pressures could improve weather forecasting.

• http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00188.1 -- Surface Pressure Observations From Smartphones: A Potential Revolution for High-Resolution Weather Prediction?

• http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/citedby/10.1175/MWR-D-13-00269.1 -- Utility of Dense Pressure Observations for Improving Mesoscale Analyses and Forecasts

• http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-14-00097.1 -- Impacts of Frequent Assimilation of Surface Pressure Observations on Atmospheric Analyses

User Privacy

If you'd like to know more about what type of data we collect and how we secure that data please see our easy to read, jargon free privacy policy at https://www.cmetwx.com/privacy_policy.html