Show HN: All Clear Weather – creating new live weather datasets with ML

I make All Clear Weather (Android, US-only for now, see below for why) because I demand better of weather apps. Many of the top weather apps on Android do nothing but display sometimes-outdated weather data in poorly formatted tables. Frankly the top 20 look exactly the same! I'm making a new weather app because it's 2018 and the category is stagnant. Here is what I am passionately dedicated to bringing to a weather app to make it interesting and useful at the same time:

1) Your phone probably has a barometer in it! Most Android phones do because Google likes to use it as an altimeter to give you better indoor directions. So with iPhones also having barometers (for the iPhone health app), there are now billions of phones around the world are carrying barometers that next to no weather apps are using.

With All Clear you can see the sensor data from the weather sensors in your phone and know that it is being analyzed and processed into 'virtual weather stations' so it can be eventually included in the main weather models. You'll know this because you'll be able to see it happen in the app as I make progress. Here is a quick graph I made: https://imgur.com/gallery/IPj6w7N of Hurricane Florence's pressure recorded by phones in North Carolina a few weeks ago. It may take some imagination to see how the data could be useful (it needs cleaning, privacy protection, quality control, etc) but you can see the data in there and I know it can be extracted into useful numerical weather model inputs.

2) All the phones in the world have cameras. These cameras are taking photos of the sky and the weather all day long but nobody is using this data in weather forecasting. That's obviously because it is difficult to extract meaningful numeric weather data from a photo, but I believe it can be done. All Clear has a feature to let users send in photos of the sky with tags, and I am going to use this data as a training data set to a machine learning classifier. If it works, it should be able to automatically tag weather information in any outdoor photo - assuming the training dataset is good and my ML is good.

3) Current conditions in a lot of weather apps are out of date, since the source data is out-of-date. A lot of the US MADIS stations update only hourly, and they can miss updating in intervals when significant weather happens. Sometimes they update and sometimes they don't. But it's so frustrating to look outside and see it is raining while your weather app just happily denies the existence of that rain and tells you it's just partly cloudy. So I let you fix it, for yourself and for others nearby. If enough people all submit the same weather condition, contrary to the station reports, the app will start showing that condition as the Truth for current conditions in that area. (safeguards built in to protect against cheating).

4) I am dedicated to open source. While the whole app isn't open source yet (it will be!) the main sensor code that does the barometric pressure data collection along with other sensors, is open source on GitHub: https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary. I would encourage other weather app developers to enable features in their apps to aide in the crowdsourcing of potentially very useful weather data that is otherwise idle in phones.

5) It's in the details. The US NOAA Forecast API that the app uses only returns its text forecasts with F and mi built-in as units. I wrote an algorithm (regexes mostly) to convert the text forecast units on-the-fly so you can be reading it and see it as C and km if you like, it's seamless. Well there is one error I know about, sometimes it will say "quarter of an inch of rain" which is a bit of a pain to parse, but I'm working on that too!

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Alright, there's what All Clear can do that other weather apps can't.

And a note about it being US-only. I tried to make this international from the get-go, and wasted months using IBM's API from WU that barely worked at all. Then they yanked the payment form off the web the week I was going to publish the app and buy their $400/month package. No longer an option. Now you have to wait for a phone call, might be weeks, and the prices are like $3,000 for the equivalent data (or something, hard to say). If you want to read some of the drama about this, check out this WeatherUnderground thread: https://apicommunity.wunderground.com/weatherapi/topics/weat... where people are describing the confusion as WU cuts off their keys and makes the service dramatically more expensive.

So the app is using the US NOAA data for free and I am investigating alternatives for international weather data.

Here is All Clear Weather on Google Play (US): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...